There are 63 posts filed in DR Congo (this is page 1 of 5).
I wrote this post in June 2018, for iz3w (Informationszentrum 3. welt), an organisation based in Freiburg, Germany. A German translation of an edited version is published in the May/June 2019 issue titled, “Klimawandel” (Climate change). The following is the unedited version.
An investigation by the Rainforest Foundation UK has found that communities living around the Salonga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo have been subjected to torture, murder and gang-rape at the hands of eco-guards supported by WWF with funding from a range of international donors.
“The technology is well known and has been available for thousands of years. Everybody knows how not to cut down a tree.” That spectacularly naive comment came from Norway’s then-prime minister Jens Stoltenberg in December 2007 at the launch of Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI).
The World Bank and the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo are coming to the end of negotiations about the country’s Emission Reductions Payment Agreement. While no official announcement has yet been made, REDD-Monitor understands that the Agreement was signed last week.
Back in May 2008, in an article titled, “What Would It Cost to Save Nature?”, German magazine Der Spiegel announced the dawning of “A new age of conservation”.
For the first time, a value is being assigned to forests, plants and coral reefs, a value that makes them worthy of protection. It is nothing short of a paradigm shift in the environmental movement.
Norway has spent NOK 1 billion on saving the rainforest in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But deforestation in DRC is increasing rapidly. On 12 May 2018, Dagsrevyen, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation’s daily news programme reported on Norway’s failure to address deforestation in DRC.
Last week, the third meeting of the Partners of the Global Peatlands Initiative took place in Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of Congo. After the meeting, the United Nations Environment Programme, one of the organisers and funder of the meeting, put out a press release announcing that a “historic agreement” had been signed “to protect the world’s largest tropical peatland”.
The province of Mai Ndombe in the Democratic Republic of Congo has about 10 million hectares of forest. Of the population of 1.8 million living in Mai Ndombe, about 73,000 are indigenous people.
Last week, José Ilanga the Director General in charge of forests at the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development in the Democratic Republic of Congo, announced that plans were underway to lift the country’s 16-year-old moratorium on new logging concessions. Today, more than 50 environmental and human rights organisations have written to key donor governments and agencies, including Norway, UK, France, USA, and the World Bank, calling on them to suspend funding immediately to the DRC government for forestry and forest conservation.
On 1 February 2018, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s forests were dealt a double blow. First, DRC’s Minister of Environment, Amy Ambatobe, reinstated three illegal logging concessions covering an area of 6,500 square kilometres. Second, DRC’s president, Joseph Kabila, signed off on three oil exploration concessions covering a huge area of Mai Ndombe province, including part of the Salonga National Park.
In November 2017, Fern published a report titled, “Unearned credit: Why aviation industry forest offsets are doomed to fail”. The report takes aim at the aviation industry’s planned carbon trading mechanism, the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation.
Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu is a big cheese at the UN climate meetings. He was the Democratic Republic of Congo’s lead negotiator at COP23 in Bonn. He is the chairman of the Coalition for Rainforest Nations. He is the ex-chair of the Africa Group at the climate negotiations, and last year he was the chair of the least developed countries. He is on the board of the Green Climate Fund.
Ten days ago, REDD-Monitor sent some questions to Hicham Daoudi, project manager of WWF’s REDD project in Mai Ndombe, Democratic Republic of Congo. The questions were a follow up to a post on REDD-Monitor that was based on a critical report about the REDD project, written by LICOCO, a Congolese NGO.
Last week, REDD-Monitor wrote about the Democratic Republic of Congo’s delegation to COP23 in Bonn. The questions in the headline pretty much sum up the post: “Why did the Democratic Republic of Congo send 340 delegates to COP23 in Bonn? And who paid?”
According to the UNFCCC’s provisional list of registered parties, just over 19,000 people travelled to Bonn for this year’s climate negotiations, COP23. While that’s a huge number of people, it’s only about half of the number that travelled to Paris for COP21. Ovais Sarmad, Deputy Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, says that 28,800 people took part over the two weeks of meetings in Bonn.
