(Business in Cameroon) – Cameroon has relaunched a six-year biodiversity and land restoration programme in the Dja landscape, a UNESCO World Heritage site, with a headline cost of 6.5 billion CFA francs ($10.5 million). The project promises to restore degraded land and reconnect fragmented habitats, but its financing structure underscores the extent to which Yaoundé still relies on external climate funds rather than national budget resources.
According to project documents, the Dja initiative is not a new government line item but part of the Global Environment Facility’s Congo Basin Sustainable Landscapes programme. The United Nations Environment Programme is the implementing agency, while Cameroon’s Ministry of Environment executes the work. Although widely reported in local media as a fresh government commitment, only about one third of the total is Cameroon’s co-financing—mostly in-kind contributions such as staff time and existing park budgets. The remainder comes from GEF and UNEP grants.
The project targets are ambitious. Management effectiveness is expected to improve across 700,000 hectares of protected areas, while 10,000 hectares of degraded land are slated for restoration. More than 1 million hectares are supposed to fall under sustainable production systems, ranging from community forestry to certified cocoa landscapes. Climate models project mitigation of about 45 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent over 30 years, though that estimate assumes near-zero deforestation in the landscape for three decades—a scenario that experts caution is unlikely.
The Dja Faunal Reserve, one of Africa’s oldest protected areas, has been under growing stress. UNESCO data show annual forest loss averaging 1% between 2000 and 2020, while elephant populations fell 70% in little more than a decade. In 2021, UNESCO formally placed the site on its World Heritage in Danger list, citing deforestation, poaching and extractive pressures. Officials in Yaoundé and UNEP argue that the new programme is essential to halt these trends.
But the financial scale remains marginal compared to Cameroon’s broader climate challenge. The country’s nationally determined contribution, updated in 2021, estimates financing needs of 37.4 trillion CFA francs ($61 billion) between 2021 and 2030 for mitigation and adaptation combined. By contrast, inflows of climate-related development finance averaged just 340 billion CFA francs a year between 2017 and 2021, mostly from multilateral sources. In 2022 Cameroon mobilised only about 250 billion CFA francs, with almost no private sector involvement.
For communities around the Dja, the programme may bring opportunities through agroforestry and sustainable livelihoods, but it also illustrates the limits of projectised, donor-driven finance. Cameroon’s fiscal contribution is symbolic, and without deeper domestic mobilisation or innovative financing mechanisms, the country risks remaining dependent on multilateral envelopes to cover its climate bill.
The Dja landscape project is therefore both a step forward and a reminder of the gap. It demonstrates progress in linking biodiversity protection with livelihoods, yet also highlights how much more capital—public, private and concessional—will be needed if Cameroon is to meet its 2030 climate targets. The government’s challenge is to turn such externally driven pilots into scalable national programmes backed by real budgetary commitments.
Mercy Fosoh
