A FORMER FRENCH colony in central Africa, the Central African Republic is entirely landlocked and has an area of 240,534 sq. mi. (622,984 sq. km.), with a population of 4,216,666 (2007 est.), and a population density of 17.5 people per sq. mi. (6.8 people per sq. km.). The country is poor, with 3 percent of the land arable, and a further 5 percent used for meadows and pasture. In spite of this, many of the desperately poor people in the country survive through subsistence farming.
Some 64 percent of the country is forested, which helps reduce its already extremely low carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the country. CO2 emissions per capita from the Central African Republic have never exceeded 0.1 metric tons per person, reaching 0.06 metric tons per person by 2003. These come entirely from the use of liquid fuels, and the country has a poor public transport network. It has also faced problems with water shortages, not only due to global warming and climate change, but also from the growing of cotton that has been used to manufacture velvet.
The government of Andre Kolingba took part in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change signed in Rio de Janeiro in May 1992, and it ratified the Vienna Convention in the following year. The government has so far not expressed an opinion on the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
