Deploying Payments for Environmental Services at scale in Central Africa

Kinshasa, DRC - 27 January 2025 - The Congo Basin, with its 233 million hectares of tropical forest, is home to exceptional biodiversity and plays a crucial role in climate regulation and the preservation of global biodiversity. Although deforestation deforestation rates have stabilised to some extent, the annual loss of annual loss of one million hectares of forest in Central Africa remains worrying. Despite the promising progress made under the Fair Deal for the Congo Basin, ensuring a long-term preservation of these precious ecosystems remains a major challenge.

Faced with the threat of deforestation, the six signatory countries of the signatories to the Joint Declaration of the Central African Forest Initiative are meeting in Kinshasa from 27 to 29 January 2025, in an event centered on Payments for Environmental Services (PES), hosted by HEM Eve Bazaiba, State Minister for Environment and Sustainable Development of the DRC.

For three days, the Ministers of Forestry, Environment, Agriculture, Finance and Land use Planning, accompanied by experts and national and international experts and technical partners, will draw up an ambitious roadmap to ambitious roadmap for the large-scale deployment of PES in Central Africa. They seek to identify priority activities, financing needs and the most appropriate methods of implementation.

Innovative payments

PES are innovative payment mechanisms, conditional on verifiable results, that pay rural stakeholders and local communities for the ecosystem services they provide, based on voluntary contracts. These incentive mechanisms promote sustainable sustainable forest management and improve the livelihoods of local local populations. PES focus on six (6) key activities: agroforestry, reforestation, perennial crops, regeneration, sustainable forest management and conservation.

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