UNEP's Work - Featured Projects (Archive)

Guarding the forest guardians

Saving the great apes is also about saving people. By conserving the great apes, we can protect the livelihoods of many people who rely on forests for food, clean water and much else. Indeed, the fate of the great apes has both practical and symbolic implications for the ability of human beings to move to a sustainable future. Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary General.

Great apes live in forest ecosystems of 23 African and Asian countries (range States). With the mantle of ecosystem sustainability draped around their shoulders, great apes play a key role in maintaining the health and diversity of their ecosystems, usually through seed dispersal and creation of gaps in the forest canopy. This accords them a key status as flagship species. A decline of their populations is a key signal of an underlying decrease of other species in the ecosystems. read more>>

Resuscitating Africa’s lung

The Congo basin forest stretches across Cameroon, Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the Republic of the Congo. Some 60 million people from these countries depend on it for their sustenance. The Congo basin forest is a natural mosaic of 400 mammalian species, 280 reptile species, 900 butterfly species and 10,000 plant species. At 2 million square kilometres, it is the second largest rainforest in the world, second only to the Amazon forest in Latin America. read more>>

Lake Faguibine: Restoring a lifeline

Mali's Lake Faguibine dried up in the 1970s with far-reaching implications for the livelihoods of more than 200,000 people living in its hinterland. The local communities were forced to abandon their traditional livelihoods, which revolved around agriculture, livestock, forestry and fishery. read more>>