This Cameroon Environmental Country Profile for Shelter and Settlements (hereafter, the Profile) is intended to help address this situation. The Profile is designed to collect, analyze and summarize response-related environmental information before a crisis and provide it to humanitarian responders in the run up to a crisis. Rather than a report on the environment, the Profile is a compilation of information related to the environment and expected humanitarian operations and serves as a source book to support these operations.

Thus, the Profile considers not only the environmental issues related to a shelter but also those issues related to the settlement in which the shelter resides. As such, the Profile can be of use to other humanitarian sectors. In the case of Cameroon, the Profile has been developed during on-going humanitarian operations. As a result, this Profile provides environment-related information and analysis relative to and for use during the current humanitarian response. As part of this process, development of the Profile also provides an opportunity to identify opportunities to improve the environmental footprint of ongoing or future shelter related operations. These opportunities are identified in the specific sections under the heading of Suggested Further Actions and summarized above