STOP THE CARVE UP OF THE CONGO

Please spare a couple of minutes to help prevent an area of Congo's rainforest the size of the UK from being felled by logging companies.

In the UK, our homes and livelihoods are not threatened with destruction by logging companies.  Unfortunately, for millions of people living in the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, they are.

Sign our petition to the World Bank and the Government of the Democratic Republic of Congo to maintain a ban on the granting of new logging permits in the rainforest.

Another way of helping this campaign and all of our work with the rainforests and indigenous peoples of the world is by giving a donation. Whatever the amount of your donation, one click below can make a real difference to our work.

The Congo Basin is home to millions of people dependent on the forests to provide shelter, food, water and medicine, as well as being home to thousands of rare and endangered species, some of which are found nowhere else on earth. 

But the Government of the Democratic Republic of Congo may soon lift a ban on the allocation of new areas of forest for logging operations.  Along with the areas already identified for logging, this could open up 250,000 square kilometres of forest for logging and eventual destruction. This is the equivalent to an area the size of the UK!

We need your support today to put pressure on the Congolese Government and the World Bank to keep the current moratorium on logging in place, to prevent irreversible damage to wildlife habitat, and to help local communities gain greater control of the forest in which they live.

During and after the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the late 1990s, permits for logging operations were given out liberally and mostly illegally, giving timber companies access to tens of millions of acres of forest.

Under pressure from the international community, a crackdown on illegal activity and bans on new logging operations were imposed by the Congolese Government in 2002 and 2005.  However, some 150,000 square kilometres of new concessions have recently been issued, and there is pressure for further areas to be handed out.  The World Bank foresees the Congo becoming Africa's largest timber exporter, with perhaps a tenfold increase in the rate of rainforest logging.

In the past, forest communities have had little if any say on the future of their forest homes, livelihoods and ancestral lands.  Lacking recognition of their rights or formal legal title to the lands they and their ancestors have occupied for countless generations, they have found their forests overrun by logging companies.

The Rainforest Foundation UK works to defend the rights of forest communities.

Combining state-of-the-art technology and traditional knowledge of local forest people, we literally put forest peoples on the map:  since 2006 we have been supporting forest communities in the Congo to produce maps of their use of traditional territories, in order to secure rights to the lands and resources on which they depend. To date we have mapped over two million acres of forests.  These maps are the first steps to securing community rights to protect their forests and to manage it for their own benefit.

In the next 12 months the fate of Congo's forests could be decided.

The local partner organisations we work with in the Congo are pressing for new legislation to give forest people the power to set up community-run forests. Along with indigenous ("Pygmy") peoples' organisations, they are insisting that they should have the right to be involved in the decisions about which areas of forest are allocated to timber companies or set aside for other uses.

We must act now to get more forest peoples on the map before their lands and livelihoods are handed out to logging companies.

We have already secured some funding for our mapping work but urgently need to raise an additional £10,000 to fund our campaign and prevent an area the size of the UK from being destroyed.

The Rainforest Foundation UK is a relatively small charity making a big difference to the future of rainforest communities in the Congo Basin and Amazon rainforests. Please support our campaign today by making a donation and signing our petition.