Campo Ma'an

Campo Ma'an National Park was established in 2000 in south-western Cameroon, next to the border with Equatorial Guinea and a short distance from the Atlantic Ocean, and protects some 2,640 km².

Its creation had a specific origin: it formed part of the environmental compensation measures associated with the building of the Chad-Cameroon pipeline, funded in part by the World Bank, which crosses the country from north to south. It is one of the most cited examples of a protected area born of an offset mechanism for a major piece of infrastructure.

It protects Atlantic Biafran rainforest, a formation of extremely high diversity in the Guinean forests biodiversity hotspot, with a gradient descending from the inland hills to the coastal plain. It is home to mandrills, western lowland gorillas, chimpanzees, forest elephants and a very rich birdlife, and the nearby beaches are a nesting area for leatherback turtles. Its main threats are poaching, the expansion of oil palm and rubber plantations around it and the pressure of settlement linked to the port development at Kribi.