Environment & Climate
The Palm Oil Paradox: How Cameroon Lost the Crop It Invented
Cameroon once led the world in oil palm cultivation, with advanced hybrid varieties and the pollinator weevil that Southeast Asia would later adopt. Six decades later, Indonesia and Malaysia command 85 percent of global production while Cameroon produces barely half a million tons—a reversal driven not by agricultural limits but by institutional neglect and missed industrialization.
The Carbon Foodprint: How a Duke Team Made Sustainability Visible in the Dining Hall
Norbert Foy and his interdisciplinary team won Duke University's inaugural Masters Impact Challenge by designing a system to display the carbon emissions of each meal sold on campus. The proposal emerged from research showing that most students would choose climate-friendly food if given better information, and aims to turn daily dining into a moment of climate awareness.
Recycling à la Camerounaise: Necessity and Invention
A humorous inventory of how ordinary Cameroonians repurpose waste materials—from plastic bottles to old slippers—turning refuse into everyday utility through ingenuity born of necessity rather than environmental consciousness.
The Baka People and the Cost of Development Without Consent
This piece examines the displacement of the Baka indigenous forest community in southern Cameroon by industrial rubber plantations, specifically the SUDCAM project, which has cleared over 10,000 hectares since 2011. It documents the Baka's dependence on their ancestral forest for livelihood and identity, and their formal requests to the government for land titles to secure their future.
Recycling à la Camerounaise: Necessity and Improvisation
A wry account of how ordinary Cameroonians have become inadvertent recyclers, repurposing everything from plastic bottles to cement bags and car tires out of practical need rather than environmental ideology. The piece catalogs these everyday acts of material reuse with humorous precision, suggesting that real sustainability emerges not from summit rhetoric but from the ground.
Shithole Recycling à la Camerounaise
A sardonic inventory of how ordinary Cameroonians repurpose waste materials out of necessity and ingenuity, even as the state fails to enforce its climate commitments. The piece catalogs everything from plastic bottles becoming oil decanters to exercise books wrapping street food, suggesting that grassroots resourcefulness has become de facto environmental policy.