Are we giving enough to save the world's most powerful lung?

Although the Amazon forest is significantly larger, the tropical forests in the Congo basin, in the heart of Africa, are today taking more CO2 out of the air. This seems like good news, but these forests are also disappearing at a rapid pace. Several countries, including ours, are investing in projects to protect the forests. Yet such projects have little chance of success if they do not also help the fast-growing population move forward.

 

It is a well-known fact that the Amazon forest is of significant importance for the climate. Much less well known is the fact that tropical forests in Central Africa are nowadays filtering out a greater amount of CO2 from the air than the Amazon forest. 

We therefore have every interest in ensuring that the Central African forest is not cut down. However, this remains a difficult balancing act: millions of people depend on it for energy and food, but also for building materials, medicine and income.

As much as 70 per cent of the Central African forest lies in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which now has about 90 million inhabitants, but will become 200 million by 2050. By the end of this century, that number could double again.

With an annual increase of 3 per cent, the Congolese population has one of the highest growth rates in the world. And it is precisely this rapidly growing population, living off the forest, that is also having a profound impact on it.

Shifting cultivation

What makes the Central African situation special is that deforestation does not stem from large agro-industrial projects or industrial logging, but from the lifestyle of a large part of the population.

Throughout the region, residents use makala, charcoal in the local language, for cooking and heating. This created a veritable charcoal industry in the vicinity of towns. Trees are felled and charred there, after which they disappear into the ubiquitous white bags and are transported to cities.

The inhabitants also depend on the forest for fertile farmland.

The Congolese rainforest is decreasing by at least 1 per cent every year.

Congolese farmers have been practising shifting cultivation for centuries, cutting down a section of forest, letting it dry and then burning it down. That kills the “weeds” and provides manure in the form of ash.

That approach worked well when there were only 5 or 10 million Congolese. Indeed, farmers did not return to the same place until 30 years later, allowing the forest to recover. That’s different nowadays, as shifting cultivation usually amounts to deforestation.

The charcoal industry and shifting cultivation, supplemented by previously modest industrial logging, have the effect of reducing the Congolese rainforest by at least 1 per cent every year. By 2020, according to the World Bank, 1.31 million hectares of intact forest were lost in the DRC, accounting for 854 million tonnes of CO2 emissions. At the current rate, little of the forest would remain at the end of the century.

Foreign backers

To protect the forest and encourage reforestation, money and resources are needed. One of the main donors is the Central African Forest Initiative (CAFI). Apart from Norway, the main donor and initiator, the EU, France, Germany, South Korea and Sweden are also investors.

If you add up the public funds over the past five years, you don’t get that far above $1 per Congolese.

Belgium is also making its contribution: International Cooperation Minister Meryame Kitir recently decided to invest 3 million euros in CAFI.

Together with the Congolese government, CAFI signed an initial letter of intent back in 2015. In it, the donors, with Norway in the lead, pledged to release $200 million between 2016-2020 for programmes to ‘stop the loss of natural forests in DRC by 2030.’

Gradually, other commitments were added, amounting to $249 million. So that works out to $50 million a year — just over half a dollar per Congolese per year.

According to their Congo expert Pierre Guigon, the World Bank invested some $130 million since 2010 to fight deforestation and test new, more sustainable livelihoods — some $10 million a year, in other words.

Apart from this, there are also funds to manage national parks and protected areas. Benjamin Belanjeelwa is in charge of international funding at the Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature (ICCN). He tells us that the ICCN has $42 million a year to manage the parks, some of which are larger than Belgium.

Of that amount, 98 per cent comes from abroad, Belanjeelwa tells us. The EU and Germany are the main donors in this regard. So if you add up those various public sources of funding over the past five years, you don’t get that far above $1 per Congolese.

Private money funds

Apart from public money funds, more private money also flows to Congo to preserve the forest or engage in reforestation.

In Belgium, for example, this involves Colruyt, which has invested some 10 million euros in recent years and plans to invest some 65 million euros in a reforestation project over the next 25 years. But also Faja Lobi, the NGO of Ghent-born Jurgen Heytens, which has used its own savings and all kinds of small and bigger donations to invest some 2 million euros in reforestation over the past 10 years.

Companies and organisations that want to work in a more climate-friendly way can offset their own emissions by buying carbon credits on the so-called voluntary carbon market. Carbon credits are realised through projects that reduce emissions or absorb CO2: i.e. it can be the spreading of improved furnaces, the realisation of renewable energy or reforestation initiatives.

Such sustainable projects must meet certain standards. For example, the carbon emission savings achieved must be incidental or have a certain permanence. Specialised organisations examine whether these conditions were met and how many tonnes of carbon — how many carbon credits — were saved or stored.

How much money is involved in the DRC is hard to say. People with their nose to the grindstone indicate that private money sources are not exactly soaring yet.

A World Bank adviser tells us that projects like those of Colruyt and Faja Lobi are rather rare in Congo. And on the register of Verra, a major label for carbon credits, we count only nine projects for the DRC, including projects for improved carbon furnaces and projects that protect existing forests.

On the register of Gold Standard, another key sustainability label for carbon credits, we count 14 initiatives certified in the DRC. Thirteen of these revolve around the spread of improved charcoal kilns.

The only reforestation project is ECOmakala, a WWF initiative to stop deforestation in Virunga Park, in eastern Congo. The project managed to convince farmers to plant pieces of land they do not use anyway, mostly because they are too steep, with fast-growing eucalyptus trees.

From the eucalyptus trees, they end up making makala (charcoal). In addition, ECOmakala not only sells improved ovens, but also manufactures them itself in Goma.

Africa’s water tower

If you add up all the public money funds, you arrive at about €100 million a year. While the private money funds are less easy to map accurately, they are certainly smaller than the public money funds, as Herman Noppen and Antoine Geerinckx of CO2-logic — part of Southpole, the world’s largest provider of climate solutions and projects, including in the DRC — testify.

Add up the public and smaller private money funds, and you can conclude that less than $200 million a year went to the DRC over the past five years to establish a development path that protects the forest while increasing the chances of prosperity for its fast-growing population.

By 2031, DRC must stop the loss of its forests, preferably even reverse it.

Today, the DRC has a population of about 90 million. In other words, less than two dollars of foreign funds per Congolese is spent on this gigantic task.

Is that enough to convince one of the world’s poorest and fastest-growing populations not to do what most other nations have already done: cut down their natural forests? Last year, the Congolese government submitted a National Determined Contribution as its contribution to the Paris climate agreement, which should cost $48 billion — that is, four times the total current government budget. An immense and not very realistic amount, but it does indicate the size of the gap with what is currently being spent.

Make no mistake, the Congo basin is Africa’s water tower. Should this green sponge be lost forever, the consequences would be incalculable.

Not only African but also global climate regulation would be thrown into serious disarray. Ten times the current global CO2 emissions would be released (see box) and a powerful collector of CO2 would disappear irrevocably.

‘The disappearance of all tropical rainforests would lead to a doubling of the current observed warming since 1850. In addition to that warming, complete deforestation would also lead to extreme shifts in rainfall,’ adds Marijn Bauwen of Ghent University.

The realisation that something must be done has finally sunk in. More funding seems to be on the way. As part of the Global Forest Finance Pledge, at the 2021 Glasgow Climate Summit, the EU pledged to invest €250 million in the Congo Basin, especially in Cameroon, Burundi, the Republic of Congo and the DRC.  A year later, these plans are still not quite concrete.

At the same climate summit, CAFI and the DRC also signed a second agreement for the period 2021-2031. Half a billion dollars has been pledged for the period 2021-2026. In return, the DRC must stop, and preferably reverse, the loss of its forests by 2031.

DRC’s annual forest loss was estimated at 6678 km2 for the period 2014-2018 — more than a fifth of Belgium’s territory. That needs to be reduced to zero by 2031.

A big challenge, because projects to protect the forests have little chance of succeeding if the poverty-stricken Congolese population does not (considerably) benefit from them. The task at hand, therefore, is to assist the Congolese population to establish an ecological development path that increases their prosperity, while convincing them to leave the rainforest largely intact.

This reportage was produced with the support of the Pascal Decroos Fund for Special Journalism.