The Congo Basin in Africa is the second most important green lung in the world, and Congo wants to pay as much as possible to maintain it. In the meantime, national parks have been expanded into fortresses, game wardens terrorize the locals. For the West, saving the planet is a dilemma.
Thirty times thirty, that’s the formula to save the world. The framework agreement agreed upon at the conclusion of the international species protection summit COP15 in Montreal stipulates that 30 percent of the planet’s land and sea surface should be protected by 2030. That actually sounds like a good plan.
However, little is known about what this actually means in practice. In order to achieve this goal, existing nature reserves must be rapidly expanded and new ones established over the next few years. It is not primarily the national parks in the Black Forest or Saxon Switzerland that are affected, but those in the tropical rainforests, where there is the most biodiversity: in the Amazon region in South America, in the African Congo Basin, in the forests of Indonesia. So in the Global South.
There, what the North has destroyed through its overconsumption is to be saved. The western industrialized countries are supposed to pay for it. During the two-week negotiations in Canada, the participating states agreed to mobilize a total of 200 billion dollars annually for species protection projects. In addition to transfer payments from the richer countries to the countries of the Global South, this includes private investments and money that is brought in on the capital markets as returns from large funds. The developed countries of the North must transfer $20 billion annually to the countries of the Global South from 2025 onwards, and at least $30 billion annually by 2030.
That doesn’t go far enough for the rainforest countries, especially Congo. In the run-up to the summit, Congo’s Deputy Prime Minister Eve Bazaiba, who is responsible for nature conservation, had already demanded at least 100 billion dollars a year from the industrialized countries from a new biodiversity fund set up specifically for this purpose. But this did not come about. The money is now to be disbursed through existing funds, primarily through the Global Environment Facility (GEF) fund, which was set up in 1991 and into which rich donor countries pay regularly.
These huge funds are the latest concepts of how a possible solution to the problem of long-term and sustainable financing in the nature conservation sector could look like: instead of constantly transferring a small amount of funding to individual projects every few years, the donor countries initially provide larger amounts of base capital for these funds available, which is then invested in the world’s major capital markets. The fund managers invest the paid-in capital in hedge funds, dividends and various bonds on the London or Frankfurt stock exchanges. The national parks around the world are supposed to use the returns generated from this to cover their running costs, for example pay the salaries of the game wardens. These approaches are no longer aimed at purely political solutions, but the idea is that the global financial market should contribute to the preservation of the planet in the future.
The federal government is one of the largest donors to the GEF. So far, the main beneficiaries have been China, Brazil, Indonesia, India and Mexico. The Congo only gets a small part of it.
Even if Eve Bazaiba was not able to get her way with her call for a new biodiversity fund: Congo, the large country in the heart of Africa, is a heavyweight in the negotiations to protect biodiversity. The Congo Basin is the second largest contiguous area of ??rainforest on the planet after the Amazon and is the world’s most important lung because it absorbs more CO2 than it emits. Two thirds of the approximately 180 million hectares of rainforest are in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country the size of Western Europe.
This was specifically used by the Congo government in the negotiations. In return, Congo’s conservation agency ICCN, which manages nine national parks and 80 nature reserves, has pledged to expand the land mass under protection from the current 8 percent to 15 percent of the country. The territory that would then be protected in the Congo would correspond to the area of ??Germany. This endeavor is critical to achieving the 30×30 goal on the planet.
In the negotiations, therefore, no one can avoid the Congo. However, Congo’s Deputy Prime Minister Bazaiba has been vocal in rejecting the 30×30 deal negotiated in Montreal. The historic framework agreement, which was supposed to be decided unanimously, was in danger of almost failing – or at least losing its credibility. In her speech, she threatened to complain to the United Nations. “We didn’t sign the contract,” she explained. An implementation is not possible. The reason: “We cannot accept these efforts without more funding.” She got support from the neighboring countries of Cameroon and Uganda.
Congo’s government is demanding twice as much money. Because the resource-rich country has enormous financial problems. War is currently raging again in eastern Congo, and the government has spent large sums on buying new war equipment. Elections are coming up next year and enormous sums of money have to be spent on them because there is hardly any financial aid from abroad. In other words, the government in Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, has barely a dollar left for species protection.
Congo’s nature conservation sector has always been almost entirely subsidized from abroad. Germany has been the main donor so far. For more than 30 years, the Federal Republic of Germany has been financing Congo’s nature conservation authority ICCN and numerous national parks, including the Kahuzi Biéga Park in the east of the country with its lowland gorillas threatened with extinction, with funds from economic cooperation. She pays the park rangers employed there a monthly premium on their measly state salary to encourage them to work. The EU is doing the same in Virunga National Park, where the mountain gorillas have their last refuge.
As early as 2013, the German development bank KfW (Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau) based in Frankfurt set up a large nature conservation fund for the Congo, the so-called Okapi fund, from the yield of which the running costs for the national parks and the salaries of the gamekeepers can be paid. In 2018, an account was opened in Kinshasa into which the interest from the fund, which is registered and resident in London for tax reasons, can be paid to ICCN. The World Bank made the first capital injection in 2019 with 7.5 million euros, KfW transferred 15 million euros. So far, however, not a single cent has been paid out from this fund. The reason: Congolese game wardens repeatedly commit attacks against the local and indigenous population in the national parks. For this reason, the federal government froze all funds in 2019 and set conditions that ICCN has not yet fully met. The attacks continue to this day.
And so Congo’s government urgently needs money from other funding sources. She is now using all possible means to do this: Just a few days ago she published an alarming report in which she described the condition of the mountain gorillas in the famous Virunga National Park, which are threatened with extinction, as extremely endangered. Rebels captured the national park in June. There are always battles in the habitat of the rare animals. Gunships have dropped bombs over the jungle.
In order to increase the pressure, Congo’s government made a strategic move in the run-up to the Montreal summit: In July, it invited oil and gas companies worldwide to an auction to acquire production licenses for untapped deposits. This also included two oil fields in the east of the country that extend into Virunga Park, where the mountain gorillas live. The Virunga has been co-financed by the European Union since 2015. Since then, it has invested over 100 million euros in the park and only promised further funds this year.
As early as 2013, there had been an international legal dispute over these oil deposits in Africa’s oldest nature reserve. At that time, the nature conservation organization WWF sued Congo’s government when the British oil company SOCO tried to tap the oil under the Virunga using corrupt methods. Congo’s government lost the case and had to make concessions, including a promise never again to issue mining licenses for raw materials within the nature reserves. Experts see the fact that this has now happened as a strategic move to blackmail the world in the run-up to the COP15 summit.
For other reasons, too, it is not so easy to expand the national parks in the Congo and establish new ones. Because the population around the parks is growing rapidly. The Congolese, battered by decades of war, have less and less farmland available for more and more hungry stomachs. As a result, the people in the vicinity of the parks are considered a threat in the eyes of western nature conservation organizations, because there are problems with poaching. Animal rights activists sounded the alarm ten years ago that there would soon be no more elephants left on the continent unless there was a radical turnaround in the trend.
In addition, the east of the country, where the endangered gorillas live, has been a war zone for over 25 years with a weak state that is hardly able to adequately protect nature and species. Hundreds of militias live in the national parks of the east, endangering nature, animals and people. They use the wilderness of the jungle specifically as a retreat.
The logical consequence of the past few years was to upgrade the national parks. Congo set the best example: The game wardens were trained by Western and Israeli military in the fight against terrorists and poachers and equipped with high technology such as drones. In July, Congo’s tourism minister announced that the parks would be placed under the authority of the notorious war crimes Ministry of Defense to defend the gorillas. Park rangers were recruited and trained nationwide. They now roam the jungle with bazookas and night vision goggles.
At the same time, meter-high, monitored fences are being erected at the edge of the rainforest over the fields of the local farmers to keep the animals in and the people out. The Virunga National Park in eastern Congo has been transformed into a real fortress with European development funds. This didn’t help: when rebels overran the park this year, the park management and game wardens had to flee.
The victims are the indigenous people such as the Batwa, also known as pygmies, whose original habitat and places of worship are now sealed off and defended by force of arms. Around the Kahuzi-Biéga National Park in eastern Congo, which is financed by Germany, game wardens have burned down numerous Batwa villages in recent years, children have died in the flames, women have been raped – by the very game wardens, whose meager state salaries were to be increased with German taxpayers’ money to encourage them to work. After the incidents became known, the federal government recently had to freeze funding for Congo’s national parks again because human rights standards were not being observed. Congo’s government also asked for more money in Montreal because the money from Berlin and Frankfurt is currently not flowing. This is what happens when you leave the implementation of species protection projects to states like Congo.
Simone Schlindwein’s book “The Green War: How nature is protected in Africa at the expense of the people – and what the West has to do with it” will be published in April.
