SAVING CAMEROON’S FORESTS

The goal of protecting Nature underpins all our work. It inspires and drives us to secure a future that allows life to flourish for people and wildlife.

Located in the Western Congo basin, Cameroon’s forests are under pressure from a variety of human activities, including agriculture, logging, and mining. In terms of farming, the country has established huge industrial tree plantations, including the world’s largest commercially owned rubber plantation – the Hévécam and Sudcam operations, run by Chinese-owned company Halcyon Agri.

These huge concessions for cash crops such as rubber and palm oil have seen large swathes of native tropical forest replaced by monoculture tree farms. In addition, the country’s growing cocoa industry has presented another emerging threat. From 2002 to 2022, Cameroon lost 873,000 hectares of humid primary forest, an area nearly equivalent to the USA’s Yellowstone National Park.

Since 2018, Mighty Earth has been working with our local partners to address the particular threat to Cameroon’s forests from natural rubber plantations. Our goal is to ensure no further rubber-driven deforestation occurs by leading rubber companies, and that recently destroyed forests are restored.