Case Study B: REDD+ in the Congo Basin, DRC (LIC)

🌳 Case Study B: REDD+ in the Congo Basin, DRC (LIC)

The Democratic Republic of Congo contains the world's second-largest tropical rainforest after the Amazon — approximately 1.5 million km² of forest covering most of the country. It is home to gorillas, chimpanzees, forest elephants, and an extraordinary diversity of plant species. It is also one of the world's most important carbon sinks: the Congo Basin forest stores approximately 30 billion tonnes of carbon — equivalent to three years of global CO₂ emissions. And it is being destroyed, slowly but relentlessly, mostly by the country's own people — not out of greed, but out of need.

The Threat: Poverty-Driven Deforestation

Approximately 90% of the DRC's population relies on charcoal for cooking fuel. There is almost no alternative. The electricity grid reaches perhaps 9% of the population. Solar cooking technology is expensive. Wood is free in the forest. So trees are cut, converted to charcoal in earth kilns (an inefficient process that loses about 75% of the wood's energy), and sold in cities where 12 million people need to cook their food. Subsistence farming also drives deforestation: families clear small patches of forest to grow cassava and maize. When the thin tropical soil becomes exhausted after 2–3 years, they clear more.

The tragedy is that the DRC's forest is priceless to the global climate — but has almost no economic value to the people living next to it if it is left standing. A tree only has value once it is cut down. This is the fundamental problem that any management approach must solve.

The REDD+ Approach

REDD+ stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation. The core idea is simple and powerful: rich countries that have already cut down most of their own forests, and whose CO₂ emissions are causing global warming, pay developing countries to protect their forests instead of clearing them. The protected forest generates carbon credits — each credit represents one tonne of CO₂ stored — which are traded on international carbon markets or bought by governments as part of their climate commitments.

• Protected areas cover approximately 15% of the DRC's territory — but enforcement is extremely difficult in a country larger than Western Europe with very limited government capacity
• Norway has paid DRC over $150 million under REDD+ agreements to protect specific areas of forest
• In principle, REDD+ should provide a revenue stream that makes standing forest economically competitive with charcoal production or farming
• In practice, payments have often failed to reach local communities — corruption, weak governance and complex payment chains mean the money sometimes stops at the national level
• Local communities who are told they can no longer cut trees for charcoal but receive no economic alternative are understandably hostile to conservation

Evaluation: The Right Idea, The Wrong Execution?