Several lessons can be learnt from the foregoing discussion. Firstly, management and conservation strategies of secondary forests in Anglophone Africa need to be developed within the framework that takes into account the local social and economic factors. Initiatives to encourage resource use are frequently most successful where people have previously gained little from a forest and where human population is relatively low. For example, hunting and trapping of wild animals are important activities in Africa, yet high population densities may mean that existing harvests from West African forest such as Korup are unsustainable. In contrast, hunting levels in less densely populated areas of central Africa e.g. Cameroon may be sustainable.
Second, it is possible to encourage an array of income generating activities within any one forest. For instance forest ecotourism is widely regarded as an important and sustainable source of foreign exchange for developing countries. Yet tourism is extremely vulnerable to the political instability which besets many Anglophone countries. To ensure that such external factors do not eliminate all direct economic incentives for the management and conservation of secondary forests, it is important to diversify the use of resources within forests.
Thirdly, active local participation in the planning, management and conservation of secondary forests lies at the core of successful integration of development and conservation. Hence the concept of ICDP is important in reducing further degradation and depletion of resources in secondary forests. The direct management of secondary forests is seen as pivotal to the success of such initiatives as the ICDP.
The direct economic benefits of conserving and managing secondary forests may often prove to be less than those of converting the forests to other forms of land use, particularly where governments are concerned with immediate rather than long-term financial returns. The fate of Anglophone Africa's secondary forest must not be dictated simply by the vagaries of economics. Therefore two important factors must be acknowledged and integrated into conservation and management planning of secondary forests. Firstly, there is a need to ensure that there is continued access to the forests. Secondly, any net costs of protecting secondary forest for aesthetic reasons must be borne by the international community through mechanisms such as debt relief. This is because many of the more direct benefits of protected forests such as climate regulation and species conservation are enjoyed at international level, while most of the costs are incurred by local people.
