Young volunteers in the city of Maroua, Cameroon, have launched an ambitious grassroots initiative to link environmental protection to food security, as communities in Cameroon’s Far North grapple with worsening climate conditions.
Video footage highlights the stark environmental realities facing the region. Buildings stand on land fractured by severe drought, while nearby farmland shows crops shrivelling under relentless heat following prolonged periods without rain.
The footage also documents volunteers working alongside families, digging into hardened soil around their homes to plant saplings. Activists are seen carefully positioning young trees and covering their roots with earth as part of the newly launched ‘One House, One Tree’ campaign.
The initiative, coordinated by the ALFA SANED project, encourages households to plant fruit trees in their backyards. Project coordinator Kalvoksou Rigorbert describes the programme as a family-centred response to climate change, designed to reduce global warming and restore the region’s ecosystem one household at a time.
Local environmental experts warn that climate fragility in the Far North has intensified in recent years. The region, part of the wider African Sahel, experiences extremely limited rainfall and prolonged dry spells, making tree planting both an ecological necessity and a means of supporting livelihoods.
According to the National Observatory on Climate Change (NOCC), rainfall in the Far North fell between 30 and 60 per cent below the five-year average during the critical early growing months last year. By mid-2025, more than 2.6 million people across Cameroon were estimated to be facing severe food insecurity as a result of erratic weather patterns.
The ‘One House, One Tree’ initiative adopts a grassroots approach, focusing on small social units to help ensure the long-term survival of newly planted vegetation. Organisers believe that by directly involving families, the programme will not only strengthen environmental resilience but also provide future food supplies and additional household income.
The attached video captures both the scale of the climate challenge and the determination of local communities to respond — one tree, and one home, at a time.
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