Centre for Environment and Development (CED)
The Centre for Environment and Development (CED) was created in 1994 in response to the need for grassroots and independent voices into the policy reforms in the forest and environment sector in Cameroon and the Congo Basin at that time. CED's overall goal articulates around the slogan \"making sustainability a reality\". CED seeks to link biodiversity conservation, as a whole, to improved livelihoods or poverty reduction, by providing incentives and support to develop community activities that protect and restore forest cover and biodiversity while improving livelihoods. Most of CED's work is based on people-centred conservation.
Projects
Community Payments for Ecosystem Services in Congo Basin: This project aims to positively assist communities of the Congo Basin region to protect tropical forest resources by finding ways to integrate payments for ecosystem services (PES) and community forest management, with the rationale that forest communities of the Congo Basin need to be at the forefront of efforts to protect, restore and sustainably manage forests. Livelihood security is inseparable from the need to slow the trend of deforestation and degradation.
The overall objectives of the project are to protect, restore, and sustainably manage forests, while improving livelihoods. Specifically the project seeks to:
- improve and strengthen community forest management by equipping communities with the knowledge and capacity to manage and protect their environmental assets;
- contribute to poverty alleviation, sustainable livelihoods and an ability to cope with institutional, economic and natural resource changes;
- help develop technical capacity at all levels and support the reform or formulation of appropriate national community forestry legislation and institutions across the region;
- derive practical lessons for future community-based REDD initiatives and feed these into relevant regional and international REDD policy processes.