Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is the second largest country in Africa and hosts the third largest population. It has immense forests and water resources, fertile soils, ample rainfall, and enormous wealth of copper, cobalt, coltan, diamonds, gold, zinc, other base metals, and oil.
Forests cover about sixty percent of the country (or about 134 million hectares) including the vast majority of the Congo Basin rainforest, the second largest tropical rainforest complex in the world after the Amazon.These forests are critical to the livelihood of about 40 million Congolese, providing food, medicine, domestic energy, building materials, and cash. They play a vital role in regulating the global environment. They harbor much unique biodiversity: DRC ranks fifth among nations for its plant and animal diversity. If they are conserved and managed well, DRC’s forests could provide many national and global benefits in perpetuity.
DRC’s wealth in natural resources stands in stark contrast with the poverty of its population. Decades of authoritarian rule, economic mismanagement, and armed conflicts severely damaged the economy and infrastructure. Despite the emergence of peace and continuous improvements in the economy since 2001 and a democratic Government established in 2006, per capita income GDP was only US$ 178 in 2008 and instability persists in some provinces.
Deforestation and Logging in DRC
While annual deforestation rates have remained relatively low, at 0.27 percent for several years, deforestation can be locally very high and is generally associated with clearing land for agriculture, population growth and migration, poverty, and conflict.
Reducing deforestation calls for action outside the forest sector including innovation to improve agricultural productivity and alternative sources of income.
While industrial timber exports from DRC are modest (less than 15% the exports of Gabon or Cameroon), grabbing of forest lands has been very intense, especially during the conflict. By 2001, an area twice the size of the United Kingdom (more than 43 million hectares) was under 285 logging contracts.
Few of these contracts had been awarded transparently or competitively; none of them was designed to benefit anyone except the contract holder—not the government, and certainly not local and indigenous people, who were neither consulted about nor expected to receive benefits from logging operations. In some locations, logging permits, mining concessions, national parks and farmland occupy the same forest space, which often spurs conflict and mismanagement.
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