Hope rises for Lake Chad restoration as UNESCO seeks to replicate FRIN’s success with Omo biosphere reserve

The successful implementation of a project to promote green economy in the Omo biosphere reserve has led to the adoption of the model used for onward implementation by countries surrounding Lake Chad. The idea is for community dwellers to adopt green economy practices that will support and not reverse restoration efforts for Lake Chad. To this end, a five-day training of trainers’ workshop took place from November 5 to 10, at the Forestry Research Institute (FRIN) in Ibadan.

Giving a background to the event, Executive Director, FRIN, Dr Adeshola Adepoju said, “Some three years ago, a programme was conceived by UNESCO and funded by KOICA, the Korea International Cooperation Agency. The programme was to promote green economy which is environment-related enterprises around the biosphere reserves. That project took place in three countries: Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania. At the conclusion of the evaluation of the project, UNESCO adjudged that Nigeria did excellently well, and that model was adopted by UNESCO for Africa region.

“When PRESIBALT was conceived and funded by African Development Bank, it has a component called BIOPALT. BIOPALT is to address the restoration of the ecosystem around Lake Chad. Within the BIOPALT is the green economy that is meant to empower the people to prevent them from reversing the ecological restoration that the BIOPALT is to address.

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“To do that, they felt the need to bring all other African countries around Lake Chad to come to FRIN to be trained by the FRIN expert on how we were able to successfully implement the KOICA project on green economy in the biosphere reserve. This is what informed FRIN being awarded the contract by UNESCO to do the training.”

Reversing a damage that has been on for about 54 years will not happen overnight. How well the project is embraced, the buy-in of the people in the area and the sustainability of the project will determine how fast Lake Chad sees a turnaround.

Programme Officer, Natural Sciences, UNESCO Regional Office, Abuja, Dr Osuji Oto, told Ecoscope that Cameroon, Niger, Central African Republic, Chad and Nigeria were participating in the workshop.

“About three weeks ago development experts assembled in FRIN to develop a training model on the application of green economy in biosphere reserves. Today, we are using the training model to train people from these five countries.

“We have a special project in the Lake Chad region that encompasses the five countries I have just mentioned. One of the components of that is natural resource conservation and biodiversity management of Lake Chad region,” the UNESCO officer said.

Referring to the Omo biosphere reserve project, he said,“We were able to conserve the natural resources, build the capacity of the local people to also benefit from the economic component of the project.

“You find out that it is not easy to tell local people not to depend on their environment. They need to depend on their environment but it has to be sustainable, whereby whatever they take from the environment, they replace for future generations.

Dr Otu explained that “for the past five years, they were able to do that. They benefitted from these alternative livelihoods while conserving the environment. It was a very successful project. Because of that, FRIN which was collaborating with UNESCO to implement the project was now asked to train other countries on what we did in Nigeria. These countries are going to benefit from the research project and they are going to replicate what was done here in their own countries.”