all of my favorite missions were ill-defined

It wasn’t that I thought I was the only person who noticed this massive unallocated chunk of elephant and gorilla infested rainforest, it was just that I couldn’t find anyone else who had.

I asked around, really. I asked people in the ministry of forests and wildlife, and the ministry of environmental protection, and people at Global Forest Watch Cameroon, and WWF, and none of them had anything to say about the status of the 830 00 ha (actually my maps say 867 000 ha) of land between the Dja Forest reserve and Congo Brazzaville, except for that yes, it sure is big, and no nobody seems to be using it for anything, and no, it doesn’t seem to have any protection status.

So I gave it the staring role in my ultimately inconsequential report potential Cameroonian forests for carbon finance, and went on to the next thing. It seemed possible to me, I admit, that the whole area had just fallen through the cracks of public/international attention for the time being, as things can do, especially in countries where people only ever use the internet to check their yahoo.fr inboxes.

I finally met some other humans who new about the area, and here is some of what I learned:

For one thing, it has a name, and it is not any of the names I had given it in the absence of better suggestions (variously ‘Haut Est Nyong’, ‘South Dja Region’ or my favorite: ‘the 9 Forest Management Units’). It is called Ngoyla-Mintom, and its recent bio reads like a a Short History of  New Conservation.

The condesnced version is that the government offered it up for sale way back in ’01, marketed to conservationists but available to anyone, and no conservationists took it because the asking price –$1.6 million/year , or just bellow $2/ha/year, was too high. Apparently you can get rainforest in Ecuador for a fraction of that. Some people blogged about it, mostly to very helpfully suggest that forests are precious and sacred and should never have a price tag. But the lasting message was that the Cameroonian government had offered to forgo the higher price they would have fetched from timber concessioners, and that BigEnviro (WWF and the Nature Conservancy in particular) failed to step up.

In addition, ‘my’ idea that the land was ripe for REDD also turned out to be far from novel.

Someone even started a little facebook discussion board about Ngoyla Montom (I am such an asshole), where 1 of the 4 commenters said “Gee, this appears to be the type of project where carbon finance could play a role in.” [‘Gee’ mine]

Rhett Butler at Mongabay.com wrote a piece about how “Carbon traders, not conservationists, could become the saviors of Ngoyla-Mintom forest”, and he made the point before I really knew Avoided Deforestation schemes existed.

I would like to believe his point that carbon financing is the most lucrative thing Cameroon could do with the land, but I think his calculations are a bit lumpy. For one thing, he’s got his REDD baseline scenario wrong. He says that because Cameroon has lost about 1% of its forest cover over the last 5 years, and 1% of 830 000 ha is 8300 ha, the area would fetch 8300 x [160 tonnes of CO2 per year] or 64 million over 30 years. (he uses 30 years because that’s how long Cameroonian timber concessions last).

Setting aside the fact that the 1% comes from FAO data which people seem not to trust these days,  (according to GTZ the figure is closer to 0.2), there is no reason to apply the national deforestation rate to an area with no detectable deforestation. Which brings us back to the zanier side of REDD, where potential target forests have to be quantified by the risk they face.

Also he assumes 160 tonnes of carbon released per hectare and I’m told that’s a little high, though I have nothing to back that up. Then again the price of an offset tonne has gone way up, as high as $25.

Whether Ngoyla-Mintom is worth more or less then what he said, he sure under reported the value of the timber concessions by a long shot. I have seen the numbers, and timber companies pay somewhere between CFA 2500 and CFA 5000, or between $5 and $10 /ha /year. That means more than $199 million over the course of 30 years, as opposed to the $26 that Butler quoted. Can REDD live up to that?

Makes me wonder why the Ministry of Forests and Wildlife even considered selling it for conservation in the first place, not that I doubt their commitment to Forests and Wildlife.