- In the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s copper-cobalt belt, a region rich in critical minerals, villagers are turning to local community forest concessions (CFCLs) to prevent their eviction and conserve the remaining savanna forests in the face of mining expansion.
- This is an area where miners from the DRC, China, the U.S. and elsewhere are searching for the minerals powering the high-tech, weapons and clean energy industries.
- Community forest concessions offer communities land titles in perpetuity and have environmental management plans led by Indigenous and local communities with the support of environmental NGOs and donors.
- But these concessions are not a perfect solution against deforestation or the eviction of communities by mining, and also suffer from a lack of funding to support all their environmental efforts.
LIKASI, Democratic Republic of Congo — North of the limits of the Lukutwe community forest concession, two armed soldiers stepped in front of Valery Kyembo and his visitors.
Wearing a bright orange vest with the logo of a reforestation project, Kyembo was guiding our journalists through a heavily deforested area in the copper-cobalt belt of the Democratic Republic of Congo, stepping around newly planted seedlings, when he was stopped by members of the FARDC, the national armed forces. Behind them stood a barrier to control access to a semi-industrial mine.
“We are visiting the boundaries of our community’s property,” Kyembo tried to explain, before one of the soldiers brandished his automatic weapon to make him turn back.
The land in question is the Lukutwe community forest concession (CFCL), 70 kilometers (43 miles) from Lubumbashi, the second-largest city in the DRC. The concession is a titled property created in the mineral-rich area of southeastern DRC by village leaders who sought to protect their land rights and miombo forests against a growing wave of mining companies taking up lands.
Ten years ago, the displacement of nearby famers from the villages of Bungubungu and Shilasimba by Société d’Exploitation de Kipoi (SEK), a company owned by Australia-based Tiger Resources in search of copper and cobalt, sparked worry in Lukutwe village that their village could be next.
“That’s why when the environmental project came to us, we wanted to have our own titled land,” Kyembo said. Other surrounding villages have similar plans.
This region of the DRC, rich in copper and cobalt, is seeing increased demand from Chinese companies, the United States, the DRC state-owned company Gécamines and other international actors for minerals that power the high-tech, weapons and clean energy industries. The DRC holds about 70% of the world’s cobalt reserves. Straddling the provinces of Lualaba and Haut-Katanga, political analysts say geopolitics and competition by the U.S. with China for mineral access are also at play on the same lands used by local communities and miombo forests. U.S. President Donald Trump has made mineral diplomacy part of his approach to solving DR Congo’s long conflict in the east — looking for access for U.S. companies.
Facing this, local communities, who hold customary land rights but not the formal rights that protect them from eviction, are turning to community forest concessions to obtain a title to their land and conserve the remaining savanna forests. This title allows them to hold up to 50,000 hectares (123,500 acres) of land in perpetuity.
Since 2016, these community forest concessions have been part of a key national strategy to provide communities with a legal basis for managing their own forests and achieving national biodiversity targets.
So far, there are 20 community forest concessions in Haut-Katanga province, with 12 others in the process of verification and approval.
As mining operations in the region are expected to expand, local community forest concessions offer a guarantee, to some degree, of stability.
“The community forest concessions indeed constitute a guarantee against land pressures … the relocations and expropriations by the miners,” said Héritier Khoji, a specialist in miombo forests and agronomy professor at the University of Lubumbashi.
Miombo forests sitting atop critical minerals
The forest concessions are accompanied by environmental management plans, led by Indigenous and local communities with the support of environmental NGOs and donors. These plans allow the use of natural resources and often include sustainable agroforestry projects, reforestation efforts, controlled logging for charcoal, and specific areas for conservation and rural development. Mining companies overlapping with or impacting a community forest concession, such as SEK, may also pay royalties to the communities for their operations.
For Hester Kyaushi, monitoring and evaluation officer at the Katanga forest concession, community forests offer a hope for future stability, conservation, and maintenance of culture.
“Today, there are no more mushrooms; wild fruits no longer exist: all trees are cut down by charcoal manufacturers. Even medicinal plants are becoming rare. In the past, when we were young, we were treated with plants,” Kyaushi said.
The Lukutwe forest concession has received $4.5 million in funding since 2016 from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), implemented by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), with the aim of reducing woodland degradation in the DRC.
“With its 6,095 hectares [15,061 acres], the [nearby] Katanga forest concession also hopes to restore these forests and organize a controlled exploitation by defining the areas of agricultural exploitation, conservation and integral protection,” said Kibole Kahutu, vice president of the Katanga forest concession. “Each forest concession has a civilian brigade, volunteers who monitor access and boundaries of the territory and forests.”
Miombo forests, the largest dry tropical forest ecosystem in the world, cover the south of the country. They’re dominated by trees of the legume family genera Brachystegia, Julbernardia and Isoberlinia, which many communities across Central and Southern Africa depend on and which protect vital watersheds.
But as in other parts of the continent, miombo forests are shrinking in the country due to agriculture, logging for firewood and mining expansion. From 2001 to 2024, the provinces of Lualaba and Haut-Katanga collectively lost 1.38 million hectares (3.41 million acres) of tree cover, with significant losses concentrated along the copper-cobalt belt.
Mining is a big part of this pressure. According to a map from the mining cadastre, the copper-cobalt belt has one of the highest concentrations of exploration and mining licenses in the country. Most of these licenses include exploration and exploitation rights for these two minerals.
Mines have sometimes caused spills that have threatened waterways, agricultural fields and human health. In Lubumbashi, a chemical spill from Congo Dongfang Mining (CDM), a subsidiary of Chinese giant Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, flooded several surrounding neighborhoods on Nov. 4, 2025. The DRC government has since suspended this major operation.
So far, communities have secured their land in 227 community forest concessions, covering more than 4.48 million hectares (11.07 million acres) across the DRC. In Haut-Katanga province, these cover 239,000 hectares (590,600 acres) of land and forests.
Many forest concessions are surrounded by or overlap with the operations of domestic and foreign mining companies. Near Kibole Kahutu’s community, the village of Kambala is trying to create a community forest concession on land that overlaps slightly with the concession held by MMG Kinsevere SARL, a subsidiary of Australia-based MMG Limited, which in turn is majority-owned by Chinese company China Minmetals.
Concerns remain
Khoji, the agronomy professor, said community forest concessions aren’t always a perfect solution against deforestation or the eviction of communities. Sometimes, communities themselves also mine for the minerals in artisanal or environmentally destructive ways.
Companies can also still operate in a community forest concession after consulting with and obtaining the consent of the communities. However, Indigenous peoples and local communities frequently complain that companies still obtain mining licenses on secured community lands even without receiving community consent or reaching benefit-sharing agreements.
“Although obtaining the concession is a safeguard against land pressures, the difficult application of laws, decrees, orders and others is an obstacle to this,” Khoji said. “In addition, there is the politicization of all sectors. We need to consider the political weight of those who threaten the community forest concessions belonging to poor communities who lack political weight.
“In our country, although no law is above the other, it seems to give more importance to the mining law,” he added. “Consequently, it will not be surprising to see someone come from Kinshasa with a mining title located in a community forest concession.”
An example, he said, is the possible relocation of a school, located between two Chinese mining companies, in Luisha village.
When the armed soldiers from the national forces stopped our journalists walking north of the Lukutwe forest concession, sources say it was exemplary of the power dynamics in the region.
“This is the kind of situation that community forest concessions are meant to address,” said Stéphane Banza, coordinator of the NGO Action for the Protection of Nature and Indigenous Peoples of Katanga (APRONAPAKAT), which supports community forest concessions, including Lukutwe’s. “A mining operation is setting up in the area, and it is becoming difficult to access your property duly obtained from the authorities.”
Dominique Bikaba is the executive director of the environmental organization Strong Roots Congo, which rather works in the eastern DRC and aims to protect the land rights of communities for the conservation of biodiversity and launch a formal discussion of mining in community forest concessions.
“These are advocacy meetings with the ministries and other relevant state institutions on the side of the Congolese state, but also empowerment campaigns, including development and capacity building of Indigenous peoples and local communities on mining issues in land law, as well as promoting the diversification of local economic and energy sources in rural areas,” Bikaba said. “We could wait for plausible conclusions to be drawn between two and three years of discussions.”
Another problem that community forest concessions face is a lack of funding to support their environmental plans.
In the villages of Lukutwe and Katanga, the concessions acquired don’t immediately bring in revenue. This discourages some residents, said Véronique Sebente, the monitoring and evaluation officer of the local committee that manages collective land ownership in Katanga village.
“We sprouted nurseries and planted trees that had started to grow. But because of lack of funding, and since we plant these trees in the bush, when there is a bushfire, young plants burn. It is not easy for us to ensure the follow-up of the concessions at its remote limits, due to lack of means of transportation,” Sebente said.
Katanga also faces the intrusion of loggers from Lubumbashi, who cut down trees to make charcoal. “When we carry out surveillance of the forest concession, it happens that these people surprise you by surrounding you and assaulting you. We are thus experiencing difficulties in securing this concession,” said Kahutu, the vice president of the Katanga concession.
Although it’s not a perfect solution, logging concessions offer at least some form of protection in the race to exploit DRC’s minerals, community members say. But a road that cuts through the Katanga concession from its south to the north, toward a mining quarry, is a constant reminder for community members that at any moment a mining company may want access to the property.
“Our support, in this case, are the documents of the community forest concession obtained from the state,” Kahutu said.
Our reporters contacted the DRC ministries of environment and mines, as well as the mining companies SEK and MMG Limited, for comment, but didn’t receive any responses by the time this story was published.
This article is part of a joint reporting project between Mongabay and Agence France-Presse (AFP).
This article was published in French on Mongabay Afrique on January 16, 2026. Read here.
Banner image: A mine in Likasi on November 26, 2025. Image by Glody MURHABAZI / AFP).
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Related Mongabay podcast episode: Deforestation in REDD-protected Congo rainforests is ‘beyond words’. Listen here.
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