Ivory Coast has announced a project to triple its forest cover by 2030.
It has lost nearly all of its forests in the last 50 years, primarily because of cocoa plantations.
The project aims to cover 20% of Ivory Coast.
It will also reinforce protection for national parks – including one of the last remnants of primary tropical rainforest in West Africa.
The World Bank will provide a $149m (£123m) to finance the project.
The inventory shows that Ivorian forest cover is now estimated at 2.97 million hectares, which represents 9.2% of the territory. Only 13.3% of classified forests and 32.2% of protected areas still contain forest cover. The West African country is thus experiencing heavy deforestation. Over the past 60 years, almost 90% of the forest cover has been cleared, making Ivory Coast one of the countries in Africa with the highest annual deforestation rate. And if nothing is done, the inventory notes, “there will be less than two million hectares of forest left in 2035 in Ivory Coast and more forest in its southern part (excluding protected areas)”.
As for wildlife, the inventory indicates that of the 120 animal species surveyed, only 3 species account for more than 40% of observations (the hare, the harnessed guib and the aulacode). In addition, more than thirty of the animal species targeted by the inventory have joined the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list. Five of these species are classified as “critically endangered“. These are the armoured crocodile, the panther, the cercopithecus Diana, the magisterial colobus and the chimpanzee.
The forest and wildlife inventory of Ivory Coast was launched in 2019. The Ivorian Ministry of Water and Forests had entrusted the project to a group made up of France’s Institut national de l’information géographique et forestière (IGN), the international subsidiary of the French National Forestry Office (ONF), and IGN FI, a geographic engineering company. To finance the project, the Ivorian Ministry of Water and Forests received funds from the French Development Agency (AFD) as part of the Contrat de désendettement et de développement (C2D), a programme for the cancellation and conversion of bilateral debt granted additionally by France.