Alex Rose-Innes
Paolo Omar Cerutti, a senior scientist at the Centre for International Forestry Research (ICFR) in Pietermaritzburg in South Africa (SA), is of the opinion that community forestry CAN work, but in a paper published by him and his research team, he shows how the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is on the right path but may getting it wrong.
The Congo River in Africa plays a huge role across six countries on the continent, from Cameroon to the Central African Republic, the DRC, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea. Known as the lung of Africa, it plays host to the world’s second largest tropical forest, the Congo Basin. Only the Amazon tropical rainforest is larger.
With tropical forests playing the role of huge carbon dioxide traps as biomass which is why deforestation is one of the main reasons for climate change and the environmental damage to the earth. The Congo Basin makes up one of the most important wilderness areas left on Earth and at 500 million acres, it is larger than the state of Alaska.
While deforestation rates are still relatively low in this area compared to other tropical regions, population growth, national industrial development and agriculture are depleting the Basin which provides shelter and food for more than three million people. Cerutti is of the opinion that the mining of minerals and the growing wild meat trade are simultaneously increasing pressure on the forest. Logging and charcoal production are also adding strain to the natural environment.
But, says Cerutti, there is a way out of this quandary and with varying legal frameworks and models properly in place any natural environment can be sustainably managed. Cameroon works on a basis of no tenure, which means communities are granted rights to establish and manage the forests in their midst, but the state could at any time decide to convert the granted area to non-forest uses. This calls for legal rights, encompassing management rights, exclusion and alienation.
In the DRC, millions of hectares of forests are available for community use.The government cedes these rights with all of the incumbent benefits such as perpetuity and relevant rights to those communities who apply for it. The DRC government grants community concessions of up to 50,000 hectares, roughly the size of the DRC capital, Kinshasa. This is seen as ground-breaking environmental change, ensuring communities would have legal recourse should the status quo change.
Cerutti and his team at the ICFR had conducted their research on the DRC model and found that it had a lot of potential, but weaknesses in the system had also been identified. The most pressing of these, according to the research, involve financial returns of the various business models communities adopt.
The benefit of proper financial management would see communities not only as agents of change, but upon receiving direct benefits from the business plan, would protect these resources. This green expert said that if those who understand and notice how caring for the environment would benefit them, even degraded lands would be restored.
So what needs to be fixed and how should it be undertaken? While the researchers admit that there is no single perfect answer, a proper management plan should first of all be adopted by the community itself. Ultimately, success would be dependent on the resources and how well a community can organise itself. The next step would be to secure tenure rights and a solid governance structure in the form of a community committee.
Currently, the major hindrance to acquiring, creating and managing these concessions is the cost of a legal title and mapping and inventory of an area. It could cost as much USD 150 000 which is impossible for the poor communities who already struggle to make a subsistence living with very little income.
The answer lies in simplifying or simply delaying existing legal constraints says Cerutti. Communities need to be shown that legalities could provide the same or even better incomes than what is already derived from illegal activities.
The ICFR team had been working closely with the DRC for over a year trying to find a concession model which would benefit the environment as much as the millions of Congolese relying on the Congo Basin for a sustainable future.
