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Despite its crucial ecological importance, the Congo Basin receives significantly less funding compared to the Amazon and the Borneo-Mekong basins in Southeast Asia.
A study by the Central African Forest Commission (COMIFAC) and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) found that between 2017 and 2021, only 4 per cent of global funding for forestry and environmental protection was allocated to the Congo Basin, amounting to just $40 million.
By contrast, the Amazon and Borneo-Mekong South East Asia received a staggering $1 billion in funding over the same period.
Yet, the Congo Basin has been rightly described as the second ‘lung of the earth’ because it sequesters the equivalent of 10 years of global carbon dioxide emissions, more than the two other forest basins.
Addressing the question of funding has therefore become a critical issue. And so, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has come up with an innovative mechanism that could unleash critical finances necessary for the protection of the Congo Basin forest. It is known as the High Integrity Forest Investment Initiative (HIFOR).
Dan Zarin, executive director, Forests and Climate Change Program at the WCS, said, “the HIFOR initiative is a Payment for Ecosystem Services scheme designed by WCS as a tool to be used by all those interested in the conservation of high integrity tropical forests”.
He told Down To Earth (DTE) that the initiative is aimed at encouraging the maintenance of climate regulation, the conservation of biodiversity in high integrity tropical forests by providing long-term funding to forest managers and the maintenance of socio-cultural values, particularly for indigenous peoples.
“The mechanism enables sites which are successfully conserving large blocks of high integrity forest to produce certificates, independently audited, that quantify the areas conserved and their attributes,” he told DTE.
“It is envisaged that the net income generated from the sale of the certificates will be shared between the national government, park management costs and indigenous peoples and local communities,“ he
explained.
He further explained that the certificates cannot be used to compensate for or ‘offset’ any impact caused by the buyers in other locations.
On August 30, Congo’s Minister of Forest Economy and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) launched Africa’s first High Integrity Forest Investment Initiative (HIFOR) project in Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of the Congo.
The pilot project in Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, the first site globally recognised as a Key Biodiversity Area for its ecological integrity, aims to generate HIFOR units and prepare for an initial transaction. This project was endorsed by the Republic of Congo’s Forest Carbon Task Force, chaired by Prime Minister Anatole Collinet Makosso.
High integrity tropical forests are estimated to remove around 1.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year from the atmosphere. Without their active role in carbon storage, the world would already be at least 0.5°C hotter.
The Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park covers over 0.4 million hectares of high-integrity tropical forest, with more than 11 million tonnes of CO2 absorbed over the past decade.
Dan Zarin told DTE that the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park “supports one of the most diverse and intact communities of tropical forest species in central Africa, including large, healthy populations of forest elephants, western lowland gorillas and chimpanzees.”
“All of these values are at risk if the forest is not successfully conserved,” he emphasised.
Still, the park faces significant threats, with Richard Malonga, country director, WCS Congo, telling DTE that since 1993 when the park was created, “we have seen steadily increasing threats to its ecological integrity”.
“At present these mostly relate to poaching of key wildlife species, illegal fishing and illegal logging. The surrounding landscape is also increasingly at risk of deforestation, fire and other pressures,” he told DTE.
He, however, acknowledged that park management was becoming increasingly effective and in 2023, “we reached a notable milestone with no
illegally poached elephants detected in the park during extensive patrols”.
“Expanded, sustained finance from innovative sources such as HIFOR would enable this successful model to be continued, to adapt to ever-rising external threats and to invest at a greater scale in the development of peripheral communities," Malonga added.
The involvement of local communities in the financing mechanism of the HIFOR initiative will be critical for its smooth implementation, the expert noted.
“Local communities are already actively involved and we expect the HIFOR project to enable an expansion of this. There are no communities within the park. There are long-term engagement programmes with communities neighbouring it — we work with them on health, education and other development projects, environmental protection, wildlife monitoring and a nascent community-based ecotourism initiative.”
He said the HIFOR system requires all projects to develop a transparent benefit distribution mechanism that has the Free, Prior and Informed Consent of Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
“This design process is just getting started for the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park pilot project. It is expected that net revenues, after transaction and monitoring costs, will be shared between the national government, park management costs and indigenous peoples and local communities,” he told DTE.
If it yields the desired dividends, it could be the trigger for unleashing critical financing for the conservation of the tens of millions of hectares of High Intensity Forests around the world.
“WCS is in the process to assess the extent of these high-integrity forests in three Congo Basin countries (Congo, DRC and Gabon),” he said.
“Collectively, high-integrity forests play a critical role in climate mitigation, both as a vast store of carbon and also as an active sink — growth exceeds tree mortality and decay in these forests, removing from the atmosphere many hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 (net) each year.”
High integrity forests, he said, worldwide recapture “about 30 per cent of all humanity’s carbon emissions through this process, and if we do not invest in maintaining this critical service it will decline, accelerating climate change and biodiversity loss”.