Yaounde: 17 July 2008

The British Government has pledged £58 million (nearly FCFA 58 billion) to create the Congo Basin Forest Fund. The Fund will finance action to protect the forests in the Congo Basin region to which Cameroon belongs. Norway has contributed £50 million (nearly FCFA50 billion) to the fund which was launched in London in June.

The forests of the Congo Basin, the second largest rainforest in the world, are an essential resource providing food, shelter and livelihoods for over 50 million people.

Covering 200 million hectares and including approximately one fifth of the world’s remaining closed canopy tropical forest, they are also a very significant carbon store with a vital role in regulating the regional climate; and harbour diversity of global importance.

The Stern Review estimates that deforestation is responsible for almost a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, and continuing deforestation even at its present rate will drive up carbon emissions and could worsen climate change very dramatically. So the world needs to help protect the forest, but this must not be done at the expense of the people who live there. People in poverty have a right to economic development but, rather than helping to achieve it, over the long term deforestation destroys livelihoods and causes irreversible changes to water and soil.

The Congo Basin Forest Fund (CBFF) is a multi donor fund set up to take early action to protect the forests in the Congo Basin region. It will be run by a Governing Council chaired by Professor Wangari Maathai and the Rt Hon. Paul Martin; and managed and disbursed by a Secretariat based at the African Development Bank (AfDB).

In the early months of the Fund to ensure a quick start to implementation, the UK Government, as the interim Secretariat of the CBFF is inviting proposals to reach the Secretariat by 1 August 2008. The fund has set up a website to guide countries and organisations wishing to apply for funding.

The Fund builds on a series of initiatives which the UK has led in partnership with Cameroon. The High Commission is currently supporting a project to help local forest communities use Global Positioning Satellite technology to map community rainforests and record instances of illegal logging. The project was recently profiled by the BBC