ABIDJAN — Environment ministers from across Africa are meeting in Côte d’Ivoire this week to discuss urgent challenges and strengthen ambition and action against land degradation, desertification and climate change on the continent.

The theme of the 10th special session of the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN) is “Raising Africa’s ambition to reduce land degradation, desertification, and drought,” and comes amid an alarming context. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, around 65% of productive land in Africa — 45% of the continent’s total area — is currently degraded, affecting more than 400 million people.

The Sahel and the Congo Basin at the heart of concerns

The situation is particularly worrying in regions like the Sahel and the Congo Basin, the world’s second-largest rainforest. The Congo Basin’s 300 million hectares (740 million acres) of forest account for 70% of Africa’s forest cover. These forests play a crucial role in carbon storage, storing a quarter of the world’s terrestrial carbon stock, around 29 billion metric tons of the greenhouse gas. If deforestation here continues at its current rate, projections suggest that 27% of the basin’s remaining undisturbed forests will be lost by 2050.

In 2023, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where the largest share of these forests are found, lost more than 500,000 hectares (1.2 million acres) of tropical primary forest as a result of its people’s heavy dependence on forest resources: clearing forest to grow food and to produce charcoal for fuel.

(According to Global Forest Watch, across the tropics globally, 3.7 million hectares of primary forest were lost in 2023, roughly equivalent to the area of Bhutan. To put it another way, in 2023, 10 football fields’ worth of forests were lost every minute in the tropics.)

The situation in the Sahel, a wide belt of savanna and dryland forest that stretches across West and Central Africa from Senegal and Gambia to the Central African Republic, is no less critical. Each year, the continent as a whole loses around 4.4 million hectares (10.9 million acres) of productive land to desertification, leading to a reduction in agricultural output and provoking under-nourishment for around 68 million Africans. The World Bank reports that 46 million people in the Sahel and the similar landscapes of the Horn of Africa suffer from severe food insecurity, exacerbated by drought and land degradation.

Africa at a critical juncture

The 10th AMCEN takes place at a critical moment, as Africa is confronted by unprecedented environmental challenges, exacerbated by climate change, several experts say. The decisions taken in Abidjan will have a significant impact on how the continent approaches these challenges in the coming years.

The Abidjan summit of environmental ministers is expected to play a crucial role in preparing African positions for the upcoming Conference of Parties (COP) to the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Cali, Colombia, in October, and the annual U.N. climate conference that will begin in Baku, Azerbaijan, in late November. Africa’s environment ministers will discuss strategies for adapting to climate change and for protecting the continent’s unique biodiversity, as well as the vital question of implementation of commitments made under international accords like the CBD and the Paris Agreement.

In this context, there will be a focus on strengthening partnerships and generating synergies to better mobilize resources, considering new finance mechanisms for efforts to restore ecosystems and make strategic use of climate funding and public-private partnerships.

AMCEN will also serve as a platform to consolidate positions to be taken up at the 16th conference of the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification and the fifth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee working to develop a binding instrument against plastic pollution.

This conference of environment ministers is unfolding in two phases. Before ministers began arriving from across Africa for discussions on Sept. 5 and 6, a meeting of experts was held on Sept. 3 and 4.

The experts’ meeting examined what progress has been made toward what is referred to as “land degradation neutrality”: avoiding new land degradation, adopting sustainable management techniques to reduce existing degradation, and intensifying efforts to restore degraded lands to health. There was also a special emphasis on strengthening resilience to drought, which has struck several regions of the continent hard, including the Horn of Africa and the Sahel.

Closer collaboration with nonstate actors

A notable aspect of this session is the involvement of nonstate actors. Ahead of the experts’ meeting, a regional consultative meeting (RCM) of civil society, nongovernmental organizations, and other stakeholders took place on Sept. 1 and 2, creating a space for these groups to contribute to discussions and make recommendations that will be accounted for in the later ministerial deliberations.

Rose Mwebaza, Africa regional director for the United Nations Environment Programme, underscored the urgency of the situation: “We note the advance of drought and desertification in many regions of Africa. We need to work with governments to find solutions to these problems. Similarly, without nongovernment organizations and civil society, we will struggle to get things moving.”

Underlining the importance of this collaboration, Parfait Kouadio, the chief of staff at Côte d’Ivoire’s Ministry of the Environment and Sustainable Development, opened the RCM saying that “to address climate change, we need coordinated action from governments and domestic actors [civil society and NGOs] capable of playing an important role both the intellectual reflection and the implementation of projects.”

In an interview with Mongabay on the sidelines of the meeting, Stella Tchoukep, head of forest campaigns for Greenpeace Africa, stressed the importance of securing the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities as a precondition of the fight against land degradation and climate change.

“For these communities to become more involved in the fight against these scourges, they need have secure land rights,” she said. “We need sustainable land tenure policies to combat climate change and land degradation.”

Tchoukep highlighted challenges that many communities face in the Congo Basin, where economic and social development based on the exploitation of natural resources is often in conflict with Indigenous rights. She cited the example of permits to explore for oil in and around the Republic of Congo’s Conkouati-Douli National Park, the oil blocs overlapping a protected area where many people live.

“We need to find ways of balancing the need for development, and the protection of communities’ land rights, and the protection of the environment,” she said. “Failing to secure community land rights will exposes them to conflict.”

As the meeting’s high-level segment begins, all eyes will be fixed on Abidjan. The decisions taken during this African environment ministers’ conference could mark a turning point in how the continent approaches its environmental challenges, foregrounding a global and ambitions approach. The future of Africa’s environment, and by extension that of the planet, will rest in large part on the capacity of African leaders to transform the commitments made here in Abidjan into concrete action on the ground.

A version of this story was originally published on our French website on Sept. 3, 2024.

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