BAMEGOARD, Republic of Congo — In the Republic of Congo’s Sangha region, the expansion of mining activities within conservation areas undermines the objectives of carbon sequestration and biodiversity preservation efforts. In 2020, the government initiated the Sangha Likouala REDD+ program aiming to reduce deforestation and enhance carbon sequestration. Through this programme, the Congolese government claims to have sequestered over 1.5 million metric tons of carbon in 2020, and expect a $8.3 million payment from the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, for it. But the concurrent expansion of mining activities contradicts the program’s conservation objectives.However, since the program’s inception, the Ministry of Mines, led by Pierre Oba, has issued at least 79 semi-industrial gold mining and exploration permits within the same region. This surge in mining permits marks a sharp increase from the mere eight permits granted between 2017 and 2020. In total, almost 14% of he Sangha territory is allocated for gold mining. Therefore, the REDD + the program’s goals are being undermined. This figure doesn’t even account for permits related to other minerals, such as iron, which are also being mined industrially in the area. Environmentalists, like Justin Landry Chekoua, have expressed alarm over the environmental degradation resulting from these mining activities, highlighting the reckless destruction of biodiversity, including the uprooting of century-old trees and contamination of rivers. Local communities are bearing the brunt of this environmental upheaval. For instance, in the village of Messock, farmer Copince Ngoma has witnessed the obliteration of his cacao plantation due to…This article was originally published on Mongabay
This story first appeared on Mongabay
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and Mongabay, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
