 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
USAID Information:
External Links:
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Central Africa Regional
Please note: All linked documents are in PDF format
Excludes P.L. 480. See Program Annex.
|
The Development Challenge: Central Africa contains the second largest area of contiguous moist tropical forest in the world with dense forests that extend over 1.9 million square kilometers of Central Africa and cover almost 50% of the landmass. The countries of the Central African Congo Basin include Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Republic of Congo, Burundi, Rwanda and Sao Tome/Principe. More than 80 million people living in the region depend on the rich forests and other natural resources for their livelihoods and economic development. Despite the richness of the biodiversity of the Congo Basin, the people of the Basin are among the poorest in Africa. The challenge facing decision makers, the global community and Basin citizens alike is to strike a balance in the conservation of these natural resources to satisfy current needs while protecting the resource base for future generations. This challenge is particularly acute in the face of prolonged political instability and conflict in many of the Basin countries, weak governance institutions, seriously depleted human and institutional capacity and a rapidly growing international demand for both tropical timber products and non-timber forest resources.
Over 50% of the forest outside of protected areas, which cover just 6% of the forest, has been allocated for logging concessions. Although only one of the many threats to the Congo Basin, commercial logging poses many challenges in maintaining the overall integrity of the forest. As loggers move across the Basin they significantly increase the pressures on the forest in and around the concessions they are logging. Logging attracts immigrants looking for good paying jobs and access to social services that are not provided by the state. This leads to increased agriculture and hunting pressures on the nearby natural resources, pressures that continue after the logging companies move on. Logging roads open up pockets of forest that were previously inaccessible to hunters and motorized transportation allowing more frequent, faster, and cheaper transportation between hunting areas and urban markets, and resulting in widespread decimation of local wildlife populations.
Recently, the war in the eastern region of the Congo Basin has had a significant impact on the forest because of its effect on the distribution of human populations in the region. Rural populations and immigrants fleeing from neighboring countries have been forced into the forest to escape soldiers and armed insurgents. As displaced populations are pushed further into the forest and cut off from local markets they are forced to rely on the natural resources in the forest for survival. Conflict also exacerbates competition over natural resources such as minerals, diamonds, timber and land, increasing the illegal exploitation of these resources in the areas experiencing conflict. Success in resource management often depends at the core on successful strategies to cope with conflict.
Central African countries tend to be politically centralized yet inefficiently administered, and economically weak. Authority over most of the forest management is in the hands of a few powerful politicians and private sector actors. This results in considerable inequity in the distribution of benefits derived from forest resource use, ignores the resource use concerns of the majority, creates incentives for people to flout unpopular laws and promotes unsustainable forest resource use. Effective, efficient and equitable forest management that contributes to broad based development in the Congo Basin must be governed by mechanisms that assure inputs from a broad range of societal actors and promote a system of institutional checks and balances, and separation of powers. Prudent use and conservation of the environmental resources in the Congo will support long-term development. The challenge, however, is how to use and conserve environmental resources without jeopardizing either the future of the human population or the biodiversity ecosystem in which they live.
The Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE) is the principal vehicle for U.S. participation in the Congo Basin Forest Partnership (CBFP), a Presidential Initiative and international partnership. In addition to the CBFP, CARPE supports a broad range of U.S. interests, including biodiversity and tropical forestry conservation, global climate change, micro-enterprise and the Presidential Initiative Against Illegal Logging (PIAIL).
The USAID Program: The CARPE Strategic Objective (SO), to reduce the rate of forest degradation and loss of biodiversity through increased local, national, and regional natural resource management capacity, is managed by USAID in Kinshasa, DRC. Activities supporting this objective take place across the region, both within the nine Congo Basin countries and in trans-border areas. CARPE implements the U.S.'s principal contribution to the CBFP. The U.S. contribution to CBFP is designed to promote economic development, alleviate poverty, improve governance and natural resources conservation through a network of national parks and protected areas, well-managed forestry concessions, and to provide assistance to communities which depend upon the conservation of the forest and wildlife resources of 11 key landscapes in six Central African countries. CARPE is working to improve conservation and sustainable resource management across the Basin in over 65 million hectares. Areas where important species of plants or animal habitats occur are being identified and mapped, management plans are being developed and staff trained. Key activities include protected area management, improved logging policies, rational forest use by local inhabitants and improved environmental governance. CARPE partners are working with Central African institutions to develop specific land and resources use plans in targeted landscapes.
Other Program Elements: Management of the CARPE program was transferred from Washington to USAID in Kinshasa. Since then there have been no other significant environment programs active in the region that are centrally or financially managed. As the CARPE program is focused on the Congo Basin where only two USAID offices are present, it is heavily dependent upon collaboration among a large number of U.S. private voluntary organizations (PVOs) and other U.S. partners with policy support from U.S. embassies. Activities in non-presence countries (NPCs) of the Congo Basin are coordinated by USAID in Kinshasa, but actual implementation relies upon the U.S. PVOs and their relationships to the governments and societies of these NPCs.
Other Donors: The CBFP was launched in September 2002 at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa. The CBFP partners comprise 29 members including all six Central African countries, multilateral donors including the World Bank, a number of major bilateral donors including the European Union, France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Japan, plus a number of research organizations and international conservation non-governmental organizations. CARPE implements the U.S.'s principal contribution to the CBFP and fosters strong collaboration with the multitude of donors in the region. Key donor CBFP partners include the European Union, World Bank, Global Environment Facility (GEF), French World-Wide Fund for the Environment, German Development Cooperation, DGIS (Netherlands), International Tropical Timber Organization (Japan), and British AID (DFID) among others.
Back to Top ^
|
