Cameroon: organizations strongly opposed to environmental crime, a scourge worth 280 billion USD

The plundering of the forests of the Congo Basin is no longer just an ecological tragedy. It has become one of the most lucrative criminal industries in the world. This observation recently brought together in Bertoua, the capital of the East region, more than a dozen civil society organizations (CSOs) around the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), to share and adopt a common strategy for protecting CSOs engaged in the fight against environmental crime, as indicated by this non-governmental organization (NGO) specializing in nature conservation. The numbers justify the urgency. According to Interpol, environmental crime rose to the third most profitable activity for organized transnational criminal groups in 2023, generating up to 280 billion USD in profits per year, more than the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of many African countries. Illegal timber trade is at the heart of it, with an estimated value between 51 and 152 billion USD per year, accounting for nearly half of the illicit revenues from environmental crime. This underground economy is not limited to fraudulent logging; it permeates the entire forest value chain, from harvesting to transportation, processing, and sale, through well-established mechanisms: financial delinquency, document fraud, corruption, money laundering. The environmental trajectory follows the same slope. In 2022, the tropics lost 4.1 million hectares of primary forest, a 10% increase compared to 2021, equivalent to nearly eleven football fields disappearing every minute, according to data from the World Resources Institute and Global Forest Watch. For a country like Cameroon, whose development strategies partly rely on forest capital, this erosion represents both an economic loss and an ecological disaster. Faced with these networks, CSOs occupy a paradoxical position. Indeed, they have become essential links in detection and denunciation, without having adequate protection measures for the risks they face. Their members are exposed to increasing security threats – physical and verbal assaults, confiscation of equipment, arbitrary legal proceedings – when they confront powerful criminal interests. Especially in a context where lack of institutional support and impunity surrounding reprisals hinder closer collaboration with state law enforcement agencies. The meeting in Bertoua brought together CSO networks from the landscapes of the Tri-National de la Sangha (TNS) and TRIDOM (Dja-Minkeb\u00e9-Odzala), alongside organizations such as Greenpeace, Forests and Rural Development (FODER), Transparency International, and the Network of NGOs in Southeast Cameroon (ROSE). This coalition illustrates the now regional dimension of this fight. The protection tools and mechanisms identified and validated during the session – including the protection tool presented by Transparency International – will be developed and promoted as advocacy instruments, with the ambition of integrating them into national frameworks for combating forest and wildlife crime, in line with forest policy, the new forest and wildlife law of July 24, 2024, and the framework law on the environment. The workshop was part of the project “Contribution to enhanced protection of civil society organizations collaborating in the detection and reporting of alleged environmental crimes,” supported by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment (BMUV) and the International Climate Initiative (IKI). This initiative reflects a change in mindset. Securing environmental whistleblowers is no longer just a human rights issue; it is a condition for preserving a strategic economic asset. As long as the protection of those who document the plunder remains weaker than the impunity of those who practice it, the market and climate value of the forest will continue to flow to those who exploit it.