**4.4. Provision of environmental services**

**Figure 2.** Number of people working with the case study council forests.

84 Tropical Forests - The Challenges of Maintaining Ecosystem Services while Managing the Landscape

**Figure 3.** Average monthly wages for people working with the case study council forests.

According to the forestry and decentralization laws of Cameroon, council forestry is an opportunity for the valorization of forest resources emanating from council forests. The sustainability of valued-added wood products has been well documented. For instance, as

"Catalyzing the value-added wood products sector has been embraced by most stake-holders – government, industry, organized labor, communities, Aboriginal peoples, environmental groups – as a sensible and rational vehicle to transform the forest sector…. Deriving more value and creating more jobs per volume of wood cut is seen as a conservation-based strategy for attaining the tenuous balance between economic well-being, environmental sustainability, and

Market opportunities for value-added wood products currently exist both within Cameroon and all over the world [15]. Indeed, in the United States alone, higher value wood products represent a US\$200 billion market [14]. Apart from value-added wood products, valorization

**4.3. Valorization of forest resources**

community health and vitality."

Kozak [14] puts it:

Given the diversity of Cameroon's forest in terms of the various forest types (e.g., humid dense evergreen forests, humid dense semideciduous forests, and gallery forests), these landscapes have enormous carbon stocks. This can provide huge opportunities for international climate initiatives such as the REDD+ mechanism to be initiated in these forests as a potential for mitigating global climate change. In this study, carbon stocks within the case study council forests were evaluated (see **Figure 4**). **Figure 4** shows the carbon contained in the biomass within each forest. Most of the carbon is concentrated in the tree biomass, followed by dead trees. The carbon content of other features (litter, understorey, and palm trees) was very negligible and could not be seen in **Figure 4**.

**Figure 4.** Total carbon stocks within the case study council forests.

#### **4.5. Threats to Cameroon's council forests**

#### *4.5.1. Illegal logging*

According to Cuny [9], illegal logging is a common practice within some council forests in Cameroon. In a visit to one of the council forest in Cameroon, Om Bilong et al. [17] noted a prominent case of illegal logging practices. In a series of personal interviews with some council officials, it was revealed that actors involved in this illicit practice include "unidentified persons coming from other communities with local residents as accomplice and as a result of poor forest monitoring from forest guards." The issue of poor forest monitoring as one of main factors unpinning illegal logging in Cameroon is supported in the prevailing literature [15, 18, 19]. Others have identified poor forest governance from the relevant ministries as the root cause for this illegality [15, 20, 21]. Indeed, as Cerutti et al. [21] report, each year, Cameroon's State officials may be collecting an estimated sum of 6 million Euros in the form of informal payments or bribes from illegal chainsaw loggers operating in the country.
