National Forest and Wildlife Inventory (IFFN): the inventory phase is completed. The data processing and analysis phase has begun.
At the beginning of January 2019, Ivory Coast officially launched its National Forest and Wildlife Inventory (IFFN). This project, for which the Contracting Authority is the MINEF (Ministry for Water and Forests), aims to deliver updated knowledge of the country’s forest and wildlife resources in order to give the government of Ivory Coast the means of action to optimize its management of these resources.
The IFFN started its active inventory phase in September 2019. This phase began with a major training programme for operators.
Today, after one and a half years of work in the field, the data-gathering phase of the project is completed, enabling the analysis phase to begin, with the results to be officially presented at the end of June 2021.
The result of the data-gathering phase already looks very positive:
- About 60 personnel from the SODEFOR (Forest Development Corporation), about 40 from the OIPR (Ivorian Parks and Reserves Office) and about 20 interviewers from the ANADER (National Rural Development Support Agency) – a total of about 120 people – were trained and deployed throughout this phase;
- 31 regions and 108 departments were visited ;
- 1,366 sample units of 25 hectares (forest and socio-economic) were inventoried and 919 transects (wildlife) were observed;
- 57 community radio stations participated with 123 agreements signed and 4,125 broadcasts of information messages in French, Malinke-Dioula and local languages;
- During the second half of 2020 RTI and Al Bayane radio broadcast 80 and 75 information spots respectively to tell the population about the activities of the IFFN teams in the field;
- ONF Ivory Coast conducted 25 monitoring missions (13 wildlife and 12 forest and socio-economic).
Although there was a slight delay due to operational and public health issues (the outbreak of COVID 19 occurred during the inventory phase) the data-gathering activities were carried out in a satisfactory manner. This data-gathering phase was particularly important, on the one hand because it was essential that the information gathered should be objective and representative of realities on the ground, and on the other that the data should be of good quality in order to ensure that decisions taken by the public authorities would be as effective as possible.
The next phase of the project, processing and analysis of the data collected, is now able to begin.
About 1.2 million elements of data will have to be processed between now and May 2021. The data collected and analysed will, among other findings, confirm and quantify the clear trend of de-forestation and damage to Ivory Coast’s forests that had already been measured using satellite imaging.
The IFFN project will end on 4 July 2021 and its activities will be taken over by a permanent IFFN unit housed at the MINEF. This will have the benefit of the skills transfer programme carried out during the project, with five specialist managers from the MINEF participating in it plus the skills and know-how acquired by the project’s national experts and seven interns among others.
Contacts
Niagne Albert-Yves Lasme (lnayfr@yahoo.fr, + 225 07 07 08 83 62 / 01 03 33 33 81) – MINEF, in charge of the C2D/CORENA/MINEF/IFFN component
Pascal Cuny (pascal.cuny@onfinternational.com, 07 87 24 48 91) – ONFI, principal technical advsier to the IFFN project