Abstract

The Congo Basin forest, the second-largest rainforest in the world, has been the subject of worldwide scientific debate and continuous monitoring for the last two decades. Cameroon, which has nearly 10% of the forests of the Congo Basin, is observing an accelerated and poorly controlled disappearance of its core forest in the eastern and southern regions, and a difficulty in setting up systems to restore degraded forests and create new ones. It is, therefore, imperative to examine the loss of forest cover in these regions. This article measures and quantify the gains and losses of forest cover disaggregated to the scale of the districts of the eastern and southern regions to evaluate the integrity of forest landscapes with respect to anthropogenic pressures, to forecast the forest cover of these regions for the year 2050, and to present and quantify in terms of area the potential sites of forest restoration. The primary data for our article are time series of satellite images, coupled with the Cameroon Forest Atlas. The results obtained indicate that the forest core of Cameroon is disappearing at an exponential rate and presents alarming integrity recoveries with respect to anthropic pressures. 46% of the study area has a high level of integrity, 37% a medium level, and 17% a low level. For the year 2050, forecasts of forest cover change obtained by implementing the RCP8.5 scenario indicate systematic losses of 13% in the East and 8% in the South compared to the current state. The Eastern region, having lost 2.96% over the period 2001-2020 of its forest cover of the year 2000 can restore up to 1.18%. On the other hand, in the South region, the 6.29% of losses over the same period, can be restored by 0.92%. This descriptive, predictive and prescriptive study of forest cover contributes to the monitoring of Cameroon’s forest core and would serve as a guide for forest managers, to orientate and accentuate in these regions, the efforts of reforestation and afforestation.