ECC reducing poverty via climate protection

Several projects like encouraging biological farming and renewable energy are going on.

Church is one of the vital forces whose efforts to protect the environment cannot be neglected. The Evangelical Church of Cameroon (ECC) is carrying out various small projects to safeguard the climate while helping smallholder farmers in rural areas to adapt to climate change so as to overcome problems of poverty and food insecurity.

The ECC environmental efforts came to the spotlight last week with the visit of Richard Madete, Consultant for renewable energy and climate protection from Tanzania, of the United Evangelical Mission (UEM), an international communion of 34 churches in Africa, Asia, and Germany, along with the Von Bodelschwingh Bethel Institutes.

“I came here to see what the ECC is doing to combat climate change, offer advice and share experience from other countries with the church in Cameroon. If you do something through the church you reach many people; reason why we work with churches,” Madete told the press in Douala after his one-week tour of various project sites in the Littoral and West Regions.

He visited the ECC not only to assess past, ongoing and planned environmental protection projects but also to assist the member churches to develop new environmental protection projects. The sites visited include the biological farming at the Multipurpose Training Centre in Bandjoun, application of renewable energy (Solar PV) in various institutions, training for the youth in Solar PV, small reforestation projects in various parishes, exemplary initiative to train young pupils in primary school on the importance of composting, as well as the programme for primary schools with a call for pupils to “Grow with a tree”, etc.

“All of the areas visited are beginning to be affected by climate change, except Moungo North where the effect is nevertheless small,” he said. The UEM/ECC effort is directed towards helping smallholder farmers through agricultural diversification strategies and improving access to information on modern farming, tree planting and protection, for example, fabrication and dissemination of efficient firewood cook stoves.

Madete called on the ECC to lobby for climate protection, participate in advocacy work on climate change, plant more trees, and use its vast unused lands to plant trees of endangered species like bush plume and kola nut.

By Christopher Jator