World Environment Day Event

Thursday, June 04, 2009

Representatives from the  Ministry of the Environment and Nature Protection, Dr. Foukom, Representatives from CARPE, WRI and NESDA
Distinguished guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Good afternoon and thank you for attending this climate change workshop in celebration of World Environmental Day.  Today’s workshop is a great example of how we can work together to combat climate change in Cameroon and globally. 

I’m very pleased to see the variety of groups present at today’s event, including representatives from Cameroonian and international non-governmental organizations, the Cameroon government and international partnership organizations.   Your presence highlights the importance of this topic, as well as the importance of working together to resolve global environmental problems.

We all have a responsibility to do what we can to combat climate change.   The United States is one of the world’s big contributors to green house gasses, but also a leader in environmental activism.  The Obama Administration has made combating climate change a high priority issue, as reflected in several recently signed pieces of legislation designed to make America greener.   The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is both an economic and environmental achievement.  It includes more than $60 billion in clean energy investments.  Some examples include:  $11 billion for a bigger energy grid to move renewable energy from plants to urban areas, $4.5 billion to make federal buildings “greener”, and $6.3 billion for state and local renewable energy efforts.   Legislation has also been signed to increase the fuel economy standards, or the number of kilometers driven per gallon of gas, for cars being produced after 2010.  This will require automakers to make cars more environmentally friendly and reduce our dependence on oil.  We are also supporting the first steps of a legally-binding treaty to reduce mercury emissions worldwide.

Here at the Embassy, we are also striving to make a “greener” Embassy.  In fact, we soon hope to join the League of Green Embassies, which requires a strict adherence to environmentally-friendly measures.  We have implemented several measures such as tree planting, automatic light switches, and water recycling to reduce our use of non-renewable resources.  We strive to reuse products as much as possible, for example, reusing packing materials used for shipping and reusing printing paper.  The United States has sponsored a project in which sawdust is transformed into briquettes used as cooking fuel in Cameroonian villages.  This will assist in reducing dependency on wood as cooking fuel and reduce deforestation in the North.  Several of the Embassy’s Self-Help projects, a fund for small-scale community based projects, are also focused on the environment.

The Cameroon government is also working on climate change issues on things like assessing carbon sinks, planting trees, reducting greenhouse gases and micro-projects targeted at the environment.  We are pleased to see such work, and look forward to their continued success in the future.

I would like to thank Antoine Eyebe and Kenneth Angu from the Central African Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE) and the Network for the Environment and Sustainable Development in Africa (NESDA) for their hard work in organizing this workshop.  As many of you may know, the Central African Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE) is a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) initiative aimed at promoting sustainable natural resource management in the Congo Basin.

The Congo Basin forest is the second largest contiguous moist tropical forest in the world and plays a key role in securing the livelihoods of Central African citizens. The forest also provides critical habitat for biodiversity conservation and it supplies vital regional and worldwide ecological services. In recognition of the important role of the Congo Basin forest and amidst the increasing pressures facing the Congo Basin forest, CARPE works to reduce the rate of forest degradation and loss of biodiversity by supporting increased local, national, and regional natural resource management capacity.

The films and presentations you saw today highlighted just how fragile our ecosystem is - a scientist once described the forest as a desert covered with trees.  I hope today’s workshop has helped identify some ways to preserve forests and biodiversity.  We all have a responsibility as human beings and world citizens to take the issue of climate change seriously and to look at ways that we can contribute to tackling the issue.  I look forward to learning more about your discussions today and I hope this is just the beginning of an ongoing dialogue.

Thank you all once again for joining us today.