In its second report, released on Monday February 28, 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sent out an alarm upon the peril of the enormous consequences for our planet. It emphasizes the need we have of adapting to the impacts of climate change. This new synthesis of all existing scientific knowledge was produced by 270 scientists from around the world and took three years to be completed.

This report also warns that Africa should be better prepared because the increase in temperature beyond 1.5°C will have serious consequences in terms of loss of biodiversity, on the increase in malaria, drought, floods and other extreme weather events.

The adaptation to these changes requires massive investments on the continent. Indeed, funding, underline the IPCC experts, is the main obstacle to the implementation of adaptation projects on the continent.

The Earth Summit held in Rio in 1992 identified sustainable forest management as the key to saving the world's forests and to enabling governments to get socio-economic benefits from them.

The Ecclesial Network of the Congo Basin (Réseau ecclésial du Bassin du Congo - REBAC), therefore asks its members to take an interest in the international financing projects that would fight climate change. Mainly in those addressing the industrial exploitation impacts on the forest in the Congo Basin affecting the States’ budgets, the community rights and the country development.

REBAC believes that a paradigm shift towards forest conservation is possible because multiple international commitments show how funding is available. Indeed, the world of finance spends hundreds of billions of dollars every year to subsidize extractive industries and industrial agriculture negatively affecting climate change. At the same time, huge sums are spent in an attempt to mitigate climate change, pandemics and other crises resulting from environmental destruction and degradation.

A requalification of the finances captured by the DRC during the COP 26 in Glasgow, for example, could protect the primary forests of the Congo Basin and meet the vital needs of local and indigenous populations who consider the forest as their home and their “supermarket”.

This is why Greenpeace, five Congolese NGOs and a deputy had decided to take action in legal field and at the Congolese Parliament to stop the reattribution of forest concessions to Chinese companies in the peat bog area in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In effect, the Environment’s Minister, Amy Ambatobe, had “issued at least two industrial cutting permits for the year 2018 to Chinese operators who have seen their illegal titles reinstated.”

"It's a contradiction that a government claiming to protect the environment", at the same time, shows "very commercial aims", said the opposition MP. For Mr. Munubo, the government must tell to parliament "if it has lifted the 2002 moratorium", that was decreed in the allocation of new industrial logging licenses, aiming to bring order to the sector.

Since 2021, REBAC has been collaborating with the Centre d'Etudes pour l'Action Sociale (CEPAS) in research entitled: The planned lifting of the DRC's moratorium on the allocation of new logging concessions and its impact on logging industry, the state budget, community rights and development. This research is run under the coordination of Chatham House (UK) and in collaboration with the Center for Transdisciplinary and Sustainability Sciences (CTSS), the Indonesian IPB University (Bogor Agricultural University) and the Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento Sustentabilidade (CEBRAP sustainability) of Brazil.

The DRC is home to more than 60% of the dense forests of the Congo Basin, the second largest tropical forest system on the planet after the Amazon. The country thus has the second primary tropical forest on the planet (86 million hectares).

This is the reason for the International Campaign for the moratorium on "the allocation of New Industrial Logging Concessions in primary forests in DR-Congo” (l'attribution des Nouvelles Concessions d'exploitation industrielle dans les Forêts Primaires en RD-Congo). To find out more and support the campaign see, RDC : Les voix montent contre l’attribution des concessions forestières par le gouvernement