ERA in Central Africa: Global Mitigation, Local Adaptation.
ERA works with government agencies and forest-dependent communities in the Congo Basin to restore degraded forest ecosystems, and conserve existing, intact forest ecosystems through Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, or REDD. Beyond the sequestration of millions of tonnes of CO2e from the atmosphere each year for multiple decades, our projects will facilitate the development of sustainable bio-economies for rural stakeholders, while conserving biodiversity, soil and watershed health.
Successfully addressing tropical deforestation requires a strong appreciation for the regionally-specific drivers of deforestation. Unlike tropical deforestation elsewhere on the planet, which is largely driven by international demand for commodities such as soy, palm oil, and cattle, deforestation in the Congo Basin is more closely associated with rural poverty.
This means that achieving good forest stewardship in the Congo Basin involves addressing not only commercial activities such as logging, but unsustainable subsistence level forest degradation, triggered in large part by the need for cooking wood in rural communities. ERA addresses these two issues through the following activities:
- Working with the highest levels of government to legally convert logging concessions into conservation concessions, and driving carbon revenues back into the concession area in to generate alternative, sustainable revenue generating activities determined by the communities living there.
- Creating long-term incentives for good forest stewardship locally through the distribution of success-based Payments for Ecosystem Services into local communities.
- Establishing fuel wood and service wood plantations in project buffer zones to provide communities with alternatives to harvesting wood from intact forests
- Partnering with government resource managers to carry out improved forest mapping and monitoring systems using remote sensing, GIS, and on-the-ground sampling.
Our projects do not operate without the Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) of indigenous and other rural stakeholders, and we incorporate stakeholders’ participation into project design and implementation at the earliest possible stage.