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7. CONCLUSIONS

There is a lack of information on secondary forests in Anglophone countries. However, much of the information available is general and does not give detailed treatment of socio-economic issues pertaining to secondary forests, much less its extent.

Many forests are managed and conserved as primary forests and yet protection within existing reserves is ineffective. This is partly because the costs of forest conservation currently fall disproportionately on nearby communities, leading to antagonistic relations between protected forests and local people. Reversing this pattern by integrating conservation and management with small-scale rural development initiatives through ICDP and CBFRM is therefore essential if local support for protection of secondary forests is to be expanded. Given the rapidly increasing rate of forest loss, degradation and depletion in Africa and the corresponding creation of secondary forests, conservation policies and national forest programmes developed in the next few years will determine the fate of Africa's secondary forests.

Major steps have been taken in recent years to integrate community economic concerns into forest policies and management. However, there still exist few economic incentives for communities to become involved in sustainable forest management in Anglophone Africa. Broader economic conditions in the region continue to be generally unfavourable. As such, economic factors have yet to be adequately dealt with in community-based approaches to forest management.


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