WCS-Congo > Conservation Challenges > Logging

Logging activities bring much-needed development to rural populations. However, they also bring with them a myriad of dangers for the forest fauna and flora. Logging operations often inadvertently facilitate illegal acti vities such as the commercial exploitation of ivory and bushmeat, as forestry companies construct a road network that opens up previously inaccessible areas to hunters and poachers.

The large logging settlements that are constructed to house the logging company employees increase the demand for bushmeat and other wildlife products, so that logging progresses like a wave over the landscape as timber companies push further and further into unlogged frontier forests, in search of the few valuable trees that are scattered across the landscape.

TOP