Report
Severe Human Rights Abuses Reported in and around Salonga National Park
An investigation by the Rainforest Foundation UK (RFUK) and Congolese NGO Actions pour la Promotion et la Protection des Peuples et Espèces Menacés (APEM), uncovered a worrying number of human rights abuses allegedly carried out by Salonga National Park’s anti-poaching agents, who receive support and funding from a range of international donors. Allegations include cases … Read more
Safer Ground: How Participatory Mapping can Mitigate the Social Impacts of Agribusiness in the Congo Basin
The expansion of commercial agriculture in the Congo Basin, especially for palm oil, poses great risks to forests and the people who depend on them for their livelihoods and culture. While efforts to make palm oil more ‘sustainable’ focus on avoiding deforestation and biodiversity loss, far less attention has been paid to land rights and … Read more
Palmed Off: An Investigation into Three Industrial Palm Oil and Rubber Projects in Cameroon and the Republic of Congo
Research carried out by the Rainforest Foundation UK and its partner organisations found that industrial palm oil and rubber plantations in Africa’s Congo Basin continue to disrespect human rights and destroy large swathes of rainforests.
Community-based Land-use Planning
In 2018, RFUK launched a new participatory mapping and land-use planning project in Maniema province, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It aims to develop a community-driven model that will inform land-use planning at the local and national level, serving as an example for a more sustainable and equitable approach to land management.
Participatory Mapping and Community Forests in the Democratic Republic of Congo
If well implemented, new community forest legislation in the DRC offers an unprecedented opportunity for communities to obtain legal rights to forests they have inhabited for generations and to improve their livelihoods. However, for community forests to deliver equitable and sustainable outcomes there is a need to ensure that they are developed by the communities themselves, … 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.
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
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
Mapping For Rights: Putting Rainforest Communities on the Map
Since its launch in 2011, MappingForRights has supported more than a thousand communities to map and share highly detailed geographical information about their lands and resources so that decisions on forests do not neglect those who depend on them most. In this introductory briefing, we address the root causes land-based conflict in Central African forests, … Read more