English
Securing forests from the bottom up: How participatory maps can support community forests in the Congo Basin
Members of Ilinga community, in DRC’s Equateur Province, celebrate as their community forest is officially granted in September 2018. Ilinga is one of several communities supported by the Rainforest Foundation UK and its local partners to map their forests and obtain a community forest. For years, there has been a growing consensus that securing land … Read more
RFUK’s Real-time Monitoring project expands to new communities in Africa
RFUK’s ForestLink system is active in three countries in Africa and will soon expand to four. From left to right: Ghana, Cameroon, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo. Upwards of 100 communities across Africa will benefit from the Rainforest Foundation UK’s Real-time Monitoring (RTM) project, thanks to new support from the UK Department for … Read more
Real-time Forest Monitoring: Empowering Communities, Preventing Illegalities, Protecting Forests
Since its creation, ForestLink has been successfully deployed as part of RFUK’s Real-Time Forest Monitoring (RTM) initiative in Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ghana and Peru. By engaging forest and indigenous peoples in the fight against illegal logging and deforestation, RTM seeks to strengthen local involvement in forest management.
People, parks and social justice: How community maps can help make conservation better
By Maud Salber, Policy Advisor, RFUK The Tumba Lediima Reserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was established in 2006, mainly to protect the local population of bonobos. Remarkably, when Tumba Lediima’s borders were drawn, nobody had thought it worthwhile to properly documenting who was already living there, and how these people would be … Read more
Protected Areas and Community Rights: Using Local Maps to Support Sustainable Conservation in the Congo Basin
The best conservation projects start with people. Yet protected areas in the Congo Basin continue to be established and managed with poor consideration for local communities’ land and resource rights, fostering conflicts and human rights abuses. A lot of these toxic situations could be avoided if thorough participatory community mapping data, such as collected through MappingForRights, … Read more
ForestLink app helps catch illegal miners red-handed in Peru
Environmental police seized an estimated £1 million of illegal mining equipment during a raid near Barranco Chico, in Madre de Dios | Photo credit: FENAMAD Over the last two months, dozens of suspected illegal gold miners causing terrible environmental damage in the Peruvian Amazon were caught with the help of the ForestLink smartphone app developed by the Rainforest … Read more
Cameroon communities speak out about impacts of large rubber plantation
Representatives of 21 villages affected by industrial rubber project Sud-Cameroun Hevea (“Sudcam”), which is responsible for the largest single destruction of rainforests anywhere in Central Africa, have denounced the impacts of the rubber plantations on their rights and livelihoods. In a statement issued last week, they ask the Cameroonian government and the company that their rights are … Read more
Community maps can help prevent an existential threat to the world’s second largest rainforest
Participatory land-use planning, shown here, can combine sophisticated satellite imagery with extensive local knowledge to help governments make informed decisions on land tenure and natural resource management. The tropical forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are amongst the most intact on the planet, with deforestation rates far lower than those in the Amazon … Read more
At Loggerheads: The Moratorium, Geographical Programming And Community Mapping In DRC
Of the three legal conditions attached to lifting DR Congo’s moratorium on new logging concessions, arguably only the third condition (on “geographic programming of future allocations”) remains to be fulfilled. Drawing on mapping data collected through MappingForRights and other sources, this briefing shows that any process which does not sufficiently take into account communities and … Read more
REDD and Rights in DRC: How Participatory Maps Can Inform the Mai-Ndombe Integrated REDD Programme
Forest tenure and resource mapping by local communities in Mai Ndombe is providing a highly detailed and comprehensive picture of customary claims and usages that are likely to extend across the entire province. The results, which authorised users can view on MappingForRights, have major implications for DRC’s flagship jurisdictional REDD+ programme, especially in terms of … Read more