Landscape management to develop agroforestry in Central-Africa. [P120]

In Central Africa, the degradation of tree resources exacerbates the effects of climate change (high variations of temperatures, dry air, etc.). However, attempts to limit this degradation by developing community forestry, individual forest plantations and agroforestry have often produced disappointing results. Contributing factors include a lack of land tenure security, which is required for planters and/or their descendants to benefit from the labour they invest in planting trees. Another is the vulnerability of isolated plantations, which can be destroyed by bushfires, wandering livestock, and illegal trees cutting. In semi-arid zones of northern Cameroon, as in the wetlands of D.R. Congo, research-and-development projects have combined two approaches to address these issues. The first seeks to establish Simple Management Plans (SMP) of village territories; the second to disseminate simple techniques for the collective management of natural forests and for setting up individual agroforestry plots using plantation or Assisted Natural Regeneration (ANR). The evaluation of these projects, based on surveys of villagers and forest inventories, shows that the combination of these two approaches may indeed enable villagers to slow the degradation of their natural resources and engage in a dynamic reconstruction of the tree component of their territories. However, the success of these combined approaches is contingent on several conditions. First, villagers must collectively see resource degradation as a danger and their restoration as an opportunity for a better future. The support of traditional authorities and administration also is required. Finally, to ensure that rebuilt agro-systems are well adapted to the current and future needs of populations under evolving environmental conditions, the support of research and development is often necessary from the earliest stages. This was the case for the enrichment of Faidherbia albida parklands in northern Cameroon and for improving systems of shifting cultivation by .