Increasing Warming of Cameroon’s Afromontane Landscape: Realities and Implications for Livelihoods and Sustainability

Cameroon’s Afromontane landscape is one of the most endowed biodiversity hotspots in the world with over 50 critically endangered and endemic flora and fauna species (Cheek et al., PeerJ 9:e11036, 2021; Martin and Burgess, One Earth, 2023). This landscape is, however, under serious threat as it has shrunk drastically from over 80,000 km2 some decades ago to less than 38,000 km2 today. Among different drivers of degradation of this landscape is the increasing warming that triggers wildfires, exacerbating the degradation process. The warming of Cameroon’s Afromontane landscape has major livelihood and sustainability implications. A review of empirical studies carried out in and around Cameroon’s Afromontane landscape indicates an increasing warming trend in the Bamenda Highlands, Bamboutos Mountain, Mount Mbam, and Mount Cameroon. The livelihood opportunities for communities living in and around this landscape are mainly food crop farming, market gardening, fruit tree farming, silviculture (mainly Eucalyptus and Podocarpus), agroforestry, poultry farming, pig farming, goat herding, grazing of cattle and sheep, hunting, harvesting of timber and non-timber forest products, apiculture, fish farming. Increasing warming of this landscape is adversely affecting the livelihoods of adjacent communities as watersheds are degraded, wildfires are recurrent, pastures are dwindling, and soil infertility is rampant, making the livelihoods of farmers, herders/graziers, market gardeners, and harvesters of non-timber forest products in particular extremely difficult. The increasing warming in Cameroon’s Afromontane landscape also has socioeconomic and environmental sustainability implications. It is therefore recommended that adequate measures be taken to restore the landscape through afforestation and reforestation campaigns, other “nature-based solutions” and “ecosystem-based adaptation” campaigns, as well as encouraging the adoption of best practices such as agroforestry, which will go a long way to improve livelihoods and ensure sustainability. This chapter is ecologically significant as it uncovers how increasing warming of the Afromontane landscape affects its sustainability and recommends best practices such as agroforestry, afforestation, and reforestation, as well as nature-based solutions and ecosystem-based adaptation to mitigate the adverse effects of increasing warming on the Afromontane landscape.