April 16, 2007  When Al Gore conceived his Climate Project, initially designed to train 1,000 activists to go out and teach thousands more about climate change, he did not have Cameroon in mind. Benjamin Tchoffo, the Watson International Scholar of the Environment who returned last week from one of Gore’s training sessions, gave him reason to think twice.

Tchoffo is executive director of the African Center for Applied Forestry Research and Development and coordinator of the Consultative and Action Group, a network of 30 Cameroonian environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs). He is one of five international scholars at Watson receiving advanced training in land-use sciences and policies under a program sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation. His colleagues in the program this semester have come from China, Brazil, India, and Nigeria. Program alumni from prior semesters now form a global network of scholars, professionals, and NGOs dedicated to environmental research and policy in over 30 developing countries.

Recently, Tchoffo met a Climate Project graduate giving a presentation at the Watson Institute, and he soon saw on the web that the project’s final training session to reach a goal of training 1,000 presenters was open for applications. He also read that the training was dedicated to equipping Americans to bring the message of Gore’s environmental documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, to citizens across the United States. But Tchoffo soon convinced project administrators to accept him as well, because as he put it, “the climate change issue is a global problem and all continents are concerned – Africa, in particular.”

Tchoffo spent three days with the final US class of 180 trainees last week in Nashville, Tennessee, where he said Gore personally led the sessions. “What he is doing is environmental education on a very large scale,” Tchoffo said, and triggering a multiplying effect to spread the climate change message most effectively.

Tchoffo has specific plans for using his Climate Project training and the work he is doing at Watson upon returning to Cameroon. He will campaign to sensitize local policymakers by presenting data showing that climate change is real and by advocating policies that address the issue more directly. In his Watson work on a land use case study, he shows that agriculture and other land uses account for over 80 percent of greenhouse gases in Cameroon. However, local legislators have so far concerned themselves only with energy consumption, when they focus on the issue at all. Tchoffo aims to demonstrate to them the need to control the “slash-and-burn” approach often used to clear land for farming.

If he succeeds, it will not be the first time that Tchoffo and his network of NGOs have diverted environmental threats. As major oil companies planned a controversial 1,070 km (665-mile) pipeline from Chad to Cameroon’s Atlantic coast, with support from the World Bank, Cameroon’s NGOs succeeded in persuading them to divert the pipeline around sensitive areas and to provide more reasonable compensation to farmers for the crops they would destroy.

Going forward, Gore is developing Climate Project training overseas, with sessions already in the works in Australia and the UK and demand from many other countries, Tchoffo said. Tentative plans will take it to South Africa, he said.

Last week, after several discussions with Gore, Tchoffo commented that “you really see he is passionate about this.” It is something that could be said of Tchoffo himself.

Find out more about Tchoffo here.
Visit the African Center for Applied Forestry Research and Development here.

 Read about the other Watson International Scholars of the Environment:
• Jokotola Akoni, of Nigeria
• Gracie Abad Maximiano, of Brazil
• Anil Kumar, of India
• Shenghe Liu, of China

Read more about the Climate Project here.