L'influence des activités redd+ dans la gestion durable des forêts à gestion décentralisée : cas de la forêt communale de Yoko et de la réserve forestière de Bapouh-bana

Abstract

Since the Rio summit in 1992, environmental protection has become a pressing concern for all States in the world. In the search for appropriate measures to protect forests and reduce climate change, REDD+ appears to be one of the important tools aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and regulating deforestation and forest degradation. Thus, the advent of REDD+ in Cameroon has enabled the various stakeholders in the forestry sector to develop new activities and redouble their efforts with regard to Sustainable Forest Management (SFM). This management aims to strengthen the life expectancy of forests in general, municipal forests and forest reserves in particular. Furthermore, it consolidates the need to develop the national REDD+ strategy in Cameroon. As a result, five (inter)communal REDD+ projects are selected and implemented in four agro-ecological zones. As such, the forest massif of Ouro-Doukoudjé, the agropastoral areas of Pitoa (high savannah zone), the coastal and mangrove forests of Tiko-Limbé III (monomodal rainfall forest zone), the Yoko Communal Forest (YCF) (forest zone with bimodal rainfall) and the Bapouh-Bana forest reserve (BFR) (highlands zone), were chosen as experimental fields. This study discusses forest management in a REDD+ context. Indeed, it is a question of evaluating the influence of the activities carried out within the framework of the REDD+ initiatives in the management of the YCF and the BFR. For this, a sample of 290 people in the YCF and 376 people in the villages of the BFR, representative of the statistics of the third population census of 2005, was defined. To carry out this work, we used various analysis methods and tools (field observation, questionnaires, interviews, remote sensing, allometric equations, botanical surveys, etc.). It emerges from this study that REDD+ influences forest management in Cameroon through the creation of new nurseries, the increase in reforested areas, the gradual adoption of sustainable cultivation techniques by local populations and the involvement of several actors in management. of the YCF and the BFR. However, it should be noted that despite the influence of this mechanism, human pressures slow down the evolution of REDD+ activities and consequently undermine sustainable management in the two sites and especially in the BFR which is strongly influenced by the population growth due to unavailability of space. In fact, land use in the two forests presents a regressive dynamic of vegetation cover in the YCF with the decrease in old forests from 2006 (11260.64 ha) to 2018 (6712.93 ha) and in the BFR with the reduction in the area of gallery forest between 1984 (1243.32 ha) and 2001 (472.272 ha). Despite changes in land use classes, the YCF and the BFR have a biomass estimated at 1555.57t/ha and 787.62t/ha respectively. The carbon stocks assessed in the YCF are 731.13 t/ha and 370.13 t/ha in the BFR. Each carbon stock corresponds to an equivalence of carbon dioxide sequestration (CO2), i.e. 2675.94 t/ha for the YCF and 1354.89 t/ha in the BFR. However, in order to promote sustainable management, reforestation and carbon sequestration of the YCF and the BFR, several suggestions were made including : strengthening awareness, consolidating training, implementing modeling of carbon stocks aimed at guiding authorities on the current and future threats to their forests according to the growth of population needs.