A 12-month research project by Professors Simon Lewis and Ifo Suspense Averti, funded by the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment
“The opportunity still exists to protect the peatlands in a largely intact state, possibly drawing on climate change mitigation funding, which can be used not only to protect the peat carbon pool but also to improve the livelihoods of people living in and around these peatlands.” (Dargie et al. 2018)
Summary
The world’s largest tropical peatland complex is in the central Congo Basin. It stores close to 30 billion tonnes of carbon, equivalent to three years of global fossil-fuel emissions. It is home to local communities and Indigenous Peoples who depend on the peat swamp forest for their livelihoods. It is also the habitat for precious biodiversity including lowland gorillas and forest elephants.
Despite its importance, the central Congo peatland complex is threatened by oil exploration, logging, mining and climate change. Yet, counter to this, there is considerable political will to protect the peatlands in the two countries where they are located. Within a year of the first mapping of the peatlands the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo signed the Brazzaville Declaration pledging to sustainably manage the peatlands. International support is growing, driven by the opportunity to combine sustainable development, climate mitigation and biodiversity protection.
In the Republic of the Congo, the government has passed legislation to prohibit industrial activities in the peatlands, and its Sustainable Land Use Programme (PUDT), is working towards defining a special legal status for the peatlands. The Republic of the Congo’s Nationally Determined Contributions draw attention to the government’s sustainable management of the peatlands and call for international recognition and compensation for these efforts.
A new research project, Developing options to protect the peatlands and livelihoods of peatland-dependent communities in the central Congo Basin, funded by the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, is assessing how stakeholders, including government, Indigenous People and local communities (IPLCs), the private sector, civil society organisations and other groups, use the peatlands – with a view to developing a broad consensus on options for their sustainable management. The focus is on the peatlands in the Republic of the Congo that are approximately one-third of the central Congo Basin peatlands area.
Goal
The goal of the project is to produce original, rigorous research showing how the Republic of the Congo’s peatlands – and the livelihoods they support – can be protected for the long-term, while delivering benefits to local communities and Indigenous Peoples to enable their sustainable development.
Research Plan
Over a twelve-month period, the research project has three parts:
1) An identification of the stakeholders and the benefits they derive from the peatlands, and their future expectations and aspirations. This includes primary research with local communities and Indigenous Peoples in the peatlands in the Republic of the Congo, to understand how they use and value the peatlands, including financial and non-financial benefits and values.
2) An analysis to identify laws, policies, and other instruments, as well as accessible income streams, that can meet stakeholders’ expectations and future benefits, while protecting the peatlands. We plan to identify costs and financing mechanisms of the options for protection, alongside enabling factors, synergies, trade-offs and critical gaps in knowledge for future research.
3) We will facilitate a workshop in Brazzaville in October 2024 bringing together the stakeholders to co-develop options for the sustainable management of the peatlands.
Output
By the end of 2024, we will publish a comprehensive report on practical, implementable, and costed options for the sustainable management of the peatlands and sustainable development of the communities that live there, in order to protect livelihoods and the peatlands they rely on. This will be distributed to all the stakeholders involved in the project and published on the CongoPeat website under Briefings.
Research Team
Professor Simon Lewis, Chair of Global Change Science at University College London (UCL) and the University of Leeds, UK, and Professor Ifo Suspense Averti of Marien Ngouabi University (MNU), Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo co-lead the project with a team of Senior Research Fellows, Cassandra Dummett, a development specialist at UCL, Dr Jonas Ngouhouo-Poufoun, a natural resource and environmental economist also at UCL, and Research Assistants, Lettycia Moundoungas Mavoungou, an environmental specialist at MNU, Eustache Amboulou, a sociologist, specialising in populations and development at MNU and Jaufrey Bamvouata, a socio-economist at MNU. The project is building on the long-term scientific project, CongoPeat, which first mapped the central Congo peatlands.
