By Ani Bassey

Experts and stakeholders in sustainable forest management have called for community reserve forests to help preserve the forest patches in local communities.

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The experts under the Sustain Forests Project disclosed this during a Research Project Results Exchange Workshop in Calabar.

Speaking on the sidelines of the workshop, Prof. Chinwe Ifejika Speranza from the University of Bern, Switzerland called for Community reserve forest to help foster sustainability.

“We expect communities involved to set up a part of their forests as community reserve forest.

“Forests are very important no matter how small for biodiversity so the community can set this up and also follow up with proper management so that there there is no encroachment”, she said.

Also speaking, Francis Bisong, a Professor of Geography from the University of Calabar said it’s critical to being all stakeholders together to brainstorm on sustainable forest management.

The Sustain forests project is a research collaboration between the University of Bern, Switzerland and the University of Calabar with funding from the European Union.

It aims to analyze the interactive roles of forest patches in agricultural landscapes of the rainforest and forest zones in Togo, Benin, Nigeria and Cameroon.

Forest patches are scattered across the fragmented agricultural landscapes of West Africa and face ongoing risks of degradation and require sustainable use and management.