By Leocadia Bongben
The Congo Basin forest plays an important role in global climate regulation and biodiversity preservation despite little international funding for forest conservation and increasing socio-economic pressure. Despite the subregion’s low rate of deforestation of 0.01 to 0.33% compared to other tropical forest regions such as the Amazon and Borneo-Mekong basins, the Congo Basin got only 4% of international financing, according to Jonas Kemajou Syapze, climate finance expert at WWF.
Speaking during their traditional Café Science, an initiative of the Cameroon Association of Science Journalists, under the theme, ‘COP29, global results and high-integrity forest progress in the Congo Basin’ with the support of the Ministry of the Environment and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
A Central African Forest Commission (COMIFAC) initiative supported by the World Wildlife Fund, WWF aims to discover underlying economic elements in the sub-region, assign value to them, and determine how they may be compensated by international partners working to preserve the environment, leading to an increase in financial flow to the Congo Basin.
This is quite simply to turn the forests of the Congo Basin from centers of expenditure, as is currently the case, into centers of revenue to generate income for the countries of the Congo Basin. The countries should be able to protect the forests and derive maximum benefit for their economies’, explains the financial expert.
A COMIFAC and WWF study reveals that between 2017 and 2021, funding for forestry and environmental protection in the world’s second-largest forest block accounted for just 4%, totaling just 40 million US dollars, compared with 1 billion dollars over the same period for the Amazon and Borneo-Mekong South-East Asia basins.
The Congo Basin, about 180 million hectares of tropical rainforest managed by six countries, is a vital asset for the planet. They also have the largest tropical peatlands in the world, covering some 145 million hectares, and sequester the equivalent of 10 years’ global CO2 emissions.
According to the Central African Forest Initiative (CAFI), the Congo Basin countries have a net positive carbon balance of over 1.5 billion tons. Placing a monetary value on these forests could provide long-term incentives for management while supporting the Paris Agreement’s climate goals. ‘If these factors are studied, analyzed, and assessed at their fair value, and if the negotiations are conducted in a fair and balanced manner so that these values are paid to the States, all of the Congo Basin’s high-integrity forests would naturally become revenue centers for the countries, boosting our countries’ economic transition to a green economy,’ argues Jonas Kemajou. The initiative comes as African countries returned from COP29 disappointed with the level of financing of climate change.
According to Timothée Kagonbé, UNFCCC and IPCC Focal Point and National CDN Coordinator at the Ministry of the Environment, Nature Conservation, and Sustainable Development (Minepded), the financial objectives have not been achieved. COP29 set a new financial target. At COP21 in Paris in 2015, it was decided that developed countries should mobilize 100 billion dollars a year. ‘Unfortunately, after eight years, we were at around 80 billion. They haven’t even been able to mobilize $100 billion in eight years. In the negotiations in Baku, the agreement allowed high-income countries to mobilize $300 billion annually until 2035, an insult for African countries, as the amount is a tenth of what is expected.
Kagombe presented the global results of COP29 and their implications for the Congo Basin, as well as the challenges linked to biodiversity conservation, and explained the Congo Basin High Integrity Forest Finance Initiative (CB-HIFFI).
Regarding the orientation of the fund set up at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to cover loss and damage under Article 8, so far we don’t have anything very essential, but the negotiations will continue in June in Bonn and again in Belem, so that we can find important elements and bring something extra to Africa, which needs the means to adapt to the issues of climate change’, he reassures us.
The only positive aspect of this 29th COP was the finalization of the modalities for implementing and entering the carbon market, discussions on which had been stagnating for nine years. However, it’s not the carbon that interests us. It’s about the co-benefits; it’s about job creation; it’s about developing a healthy environment for our people. Carbon will provide support, says Kagonbé. “Carbon is the icing on the cake. We need to transform climate constraints into development opportunities,” he concluded.