page_title: Tropical Africa
section_title: Overview
hierarchical_section_title: Tropical Africa / Overview
caption_attribution_description: English: Bayaka people in the Dzanga Sangha Ndoki reserve. Central African Republic rainforest Català: Poblat Bayaka a la selva centreafricana, Dzanga Sangha Ndoki
context_page_description: Although tropical Africa is mostly familiar to the West for its rainforests, this biogeographic realm of Africa is far more diverse. While the tropics are thought of as regions with warm to hot moist climates caused by latitude and the tropical rain belt, the geology of areas, particularly mountain chains, and geographical relation to continental and regional scale winds impact the overall parts of areas, also, making the tropics run from arid to humid in West Africa. The area has very serious overpopulation problems.
context_section_description: Tropical rainforests are tropical, moist forests of semi-deciduous varieties distributed across nine West African countries. Institute for Sea Research conducted a temperature record dating back to 700,000 years ago. Several conservation and development demographic settings are such that the most loss of rain forests has occurred in countries of higher population growth. Lack of dependable data and survey information in some countries has made the account of areas of unbroken forest and/or under land use change and their relation to economic indicators difficult to ascertain. Hence, the amount and rate of deforestation in Africa are less known than other regions of tropics.
  The term deforestation refers to the complete obstruction of forest canopy cover for means of agriculture, plantations, cattle-ranching, and other non-forest fields. Other forest use changes for example are forest disintegration (changing the spatial continuity and creating a mosaic of forest blocks and other land cover types), and dreadful conditions (selective logging of woody species for profitable purposes that affects the forest subfloor and the biodiversity). The general meaning to the term deforestation is linked not only to the value system but the type of measurement designed to assess it. Thus, the same interpretations of deforestation cause noticeable changes in the estimate of forests cleared.
  One reason for forest depletion is to grow cash crops. Nine West African countries depend on cash crop exports. Products like gum, copal, rubber, cola nuts, and palm oil provide rather steady income revenue for the West African countries. Land use change spoils entire habitats with the forests. Converting forests into timber is another cause of deforestation. Over decades, the primary forest product was commercial timber. Urbanized countries account for a great percentage of the world's wood consumption, that increased greatly between 1950 and 1980. Simultaneously, preservation measures were reinforced to protect European and American forests. Economic growth and growing environmental protection in industrialized European countries made request for tropical hardwood become strong in West Africa. In the first half of the 1980s, an annual forest loss of 7,200 km² (2,800 sq mi) was note down along the Gulf of Guinea, a figure equivalent to 4-5 per cent of the total remaining rain forest area. By 1985, 72% of West Africa's rainforests had been transformed into fallow lands and an additional 9% had been opened up by timber exploitation.
  Tropical timber became a viable choice to European wood following World War II, as trade with East European countries stop and timber noticeably became sparse in western and southern Europe. Despite efforts to promote lesser known timber species use, the market continued to focus on part of the usable timber obtainable. West Africa was prone to selective harvesting practices; while conservationists blamed the timber industry and the farmers for felling trees, others believe rain forest destruction is connected to the problem of fuel wood. The contribution of fuel wood consumption to tree stock decline in Africa is believed to be significant. It is generally believed that firewood provides 75% of the energy used in sub-Sahara Africa. With the high demand, the consumption of wood for fuel exceeds the renewal of forest cover.
  The rain forests which remain in West Africa now merely are how they were hardly 30 years ago. In Guinea, Liberia and the Ivory Coast, there is almost no primary forest cover left unscathed; in Ghana the situation is much worse, and nearly all the rain forest are cut down. Guinea-Bissau loses 200 to 350 km² (77 to 135 sq mi) of forest yearly, Senegal 500 km² (190 sq mi) of wooded savanna, and Nigeria 6,000,050,000 of both. Liberia exploits 800 km² (310 sq mi) of forests each year. Extrapolating from present rates of loss, botanist Peter Raven pictures that the majority of the world's moderate and smaller rain forests (such as in Africa) could be ruined in forty years. Tropical Africa is about 18% of the 
caption: African Pygmies living in the Dzanga-Sangha Special Reserve
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