all of my favorite missions were ill-defined

Haut-Est Nyong

The only part of my current-favorite mission that was even remotely well-defined appears to be done and over with after 10 days.

I, under the tutelage of a wise young Cameroonian forest technician (planters, read: ‘treeschool nerd’, with a better suit) have identified a nice big swath of dense humid primary forest on the Congolese border suitable for carbon financing under this hairbrained new REDD scheme.

REDD (don’t make me write out the acronym, which I already hate) is essentially a way to quantify the value of forests based on pools and flows of carbon, and pay people a corresponding amount not to cut them down.

So there’s these 9 Forest Management Units that would ordinarily be up for sale to the highest bidder – invariably a French or Chinese logging outfit -  which the Ministry of Forests has put on ice for the year, and are tentatively calling ‘under conservation’, but without any protection status, or plans for creating protection status. Fertile ground it seems, for an offset-broker like the one with which I’m loosely affiliated, to come in and fund protection status and all of that livelihood enhancing agroforestry/NTFP type stuff that goes toward not criminalizing subsistence.

There’s a braid of community forests running through the middle of it (Baka: the People Formerly Known as Pygmies), timber concessions on all sides, and very likely illegal harvesting throughout. The next step one of the steps somewhere in the future is to actually go there and see if the forest looks like it does in the satellite imagery, and see who on the ground wants to forge ahead unblinking into the white light of the New Carbon Economy.

Tomorrow it’s on to Yaounde to find out who in high places thinks this is totally inappropriate.