Stella Tchoukep : It is time the world acts like it

But for the millions of rural women living alongside logging concessions, industrial agriculture and mining sites across Africa urgency is not a theme.

It is their daily reality.

It is the extra two hours walked to reach a water source that dried up last dry season.

It is the harvest that failed again because the rains came three weeks late, or came all at once and drowned the fields.

It is the forest that fed and healed a family for generations, gone within a single concession cycle, and with it, the seeds, the medicines, the income, and the knowledge of how to use them.

It is the weight of absorbing every climate shock first, hardest, and alone while remaining legally invisible on the land they have managed for centuries.

At the Pan-African ‘Women and Climate Adaptation’ conference held in Yaounde on 28 May 2026, the Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly stated it, the Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Sustainable Development acknowledged it, and the Minister for the Advancement of Women and the Family reiterated it.

The real question now is whether those who hold power and responsibility are finally ready to act and to bear the cost.

Their vulnerability is not an accident

Rural women do not face the climate crisis because of bad luck.

They face it because of the competition for natural resources in a system that extracts wealth from their forests and lands, while leaving them with none of the benefits and all of the consequences.

They are not victims of nature.

They are victims of choices made elsewhere, by others.

When the climate shifts (rains arrive late, rivers run dry, harvests collapse), they absorb the shock first and hardest because In rural areas, women and girls are often responsible for ensuring that their families have enough food, water and firewood.

And when a logging concession, oil and gas or mining operation moves in without their consent, the forest and land they depend on disappear, taking their food, their medicine, their shelter and centuries of knowledge with them.

Let us be clear: climate change is not neutral.

It also is driven by industrial emitters of fossil fuels, agribusiness and commercial deforestation.

Often, these are the same actors encroaching on community territories.

Those who cause the damage must stop causing it, and they must help repair what they have broken.

As Central African countries seek to meet global demand for fossil fuels, timber, palm oil and other raw materials through industrial logging, large-scale agriculture and oil blocks concessions, the threats to the forests, and most vulnerable people (women, youth and Indigenous People) will only increase.

They are already acting, without waiting for us

Rural women are not passive.

They practise agroecology developed over generations, protecting soils, selecting and preserving seeds with a rigour no industrial catalogue can match.

They manage forests collectively, transmit ecological knowledge across generations, and adapt their farming systems to shifting conditions with remarkable creativity.

They are the primary custodians of agrobiodiversity of the seed diversity, the medicinal plant knowledge, and the food systems that rural communities depend on.

This is not folklore.

It is a functioning climate adaptation infrastructure, built over centuries, that operates without subsidy, without recognition, and without legal protection.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) itself recognises, with high confidence, that agricultural practices incorporating indigenous and local knowledge can address the combined challenges of climate change, food security, and biodiversity conservation simultaneously.

Despite being its most effective stewards In Africa, communities hold formal legal rights over less than 2% of forest land.

When a concession moves in without consent, that system does not pause, it is destroyed.

The women who maintained it leave with nothing: no compensation, no recognition, and a climate bill they did not create.

Securing women's access to land and recognising their rights over seeds and forest resources is not a gender programme.

It is one of the most effective climate adaptation strategies available.

Every hectare that remains outside legal community control is a hectare exposed to concession, to enclosure, to the erasure of everything women have built, maintained and protected.

The IPCC is unambiguous: insecure land tenure reduces adaptive capacity, while land policies that recognise customary tenure directly strengthen community resilience to climate change.

Awareness without reach is just a slogan

Climate finance exists.

Weather forecasting tools, digital agriculture applications, green funds, real resources have been mobilised.

But do they reach the women of Niabibeté, Nkoelon, or Zoulabot?

In most cases, no.

Alerts arrive on phones they do not own, in languages they do not read, in zones without reliable internet.

Climate funds flow through banks and institutions they cannot access without formal land titles.

Designing adaptation tools without designing their delivery to the last mile is not adaptation.

It is a theatre.

And rural women cannot afford theatre.

From awareness to action means four concrete things

Firstly, polluters should stop polluting and start paying for loss and damage.

Our Governments should cease granting land, forestry and mining concessions in areas of high conservation value and where communities, women and indigenous peoples are claiming and exercising their ancestral land rights.

Secondly, support the initiatives led by Indigenous People and Local Communities to ensure sustainable development, at least at the local level, by ensuring that the funding and technologies developed and made available are directly accessible to them.

Today, these funds flow almost exclusively through states and large institutions.

The communities who need them most are the furthest from them.

Thirdly, secure land and forest rights.

National laws must protect the land and forest rights of local communities and indigenous peoples, especially in areas targeted by large-scale investment.

In Cameroon, ongoing land reform processes offer a real window.

Civil society and the nation's elected representatives must push hard to ensure these instruments protect communities.

Lastly, build solutions with rural women, youth, people with disabilities and Indigenous People, not for them.

This will support women's roles as guardians of food security and biodiversity.

Design adaptation policies with their knowledge at the centre, not as a footnote.

The forests retreating today will not grow back in a generation.

The knowledge disappearing with them will not either.

Action cannot wait for those who have already been waiting too long.