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Cameroon’s Western Region: Environmental Disaster in the Making?

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Abstract

Cameroon’s Western Region is a beautiful, but small and most densely populated region in the country. The evolving environmental tensions building up in the region are little discussed, but a mixture of state economic policies or lack thereof, private sector business activities, and the broader economic activities have tended to condition life and tensions in the region. The region’s high population density and the small geographic space that forms the basis of economic activities for more than 90% of the population is turning the region into an emerging environmental bombshell waiting to explode. Yet, most of the environmental discussions and policies in Cameroon tend to focus more on the forest ecosystems of the country (in the greater South), the Northern Drylands, Parks, and Animal Reserves, and the polluted mega urban cities of Douala and Yaounde. I discuss the neglected environmental challenges of Cameroon’s grasslands ecosystem of the Western Region, the nature of the challenges, why there has been very little focus on it, what needs to be done and how to address them. (174)

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Fig. 7.1
figure 1

Map of Cameroon’s Administrative Regions

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Tesi, M.K. (2018). Cameroon’s Western Region: Environmental Disaster in the Making?. In: Abbink, J. (eds) The Environmental Crunch in Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77131-1_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77131-1_7

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

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