KISANGANI, Congo — A major European logging firm may have illegally converted more than a dozen of its timber concessions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo into so-called conservation concessions, a new investigation can reveal.
The concessions were reassigned without public oversight or consultation with people who will be affected.
They regulate the temperature and rain patterns of the entire region, and their trees store a third more carbon per hectare than the Amazon.
At the other end of the deal are the Portuguese Maia Trindade brothers, who lead both the timber and the carbon offset arms of Norsudtimber.
This investigation obtained one of the letters, received by environmental authorities in the province of Tshopo in April 2021.
“We have the honor of informing you that Sodefor recently transferred its forestry concession 59/14 … to KFBS.
The DRC ranks as one of the most opaque countries in the world in terms of financial transparency, and the loopholes in its laws can be easily exploited.
As the founder of the NGO Codelt, he led the first prosecution of an environment minister for abuses of power, and has called on the government to suspend dozens of concessions that experts say are illegal.
Conservation concessions are a matter of public interest that require the free, prior and informed consent of communities; and the involvement of provincial administrations from the planning stages, Mpoyi says.
Forest-dependent communities are supposed to be at the heart of REDD+ projects, which is what conservation concessions in the DRC aspire to become.
In December 2021, company representatives provided the final tranche of compensation for their logging activities — roofing and other materials — and had local chiefs sign an agreement for the concessions to issue carbon credits.
He says KFBS did not discuss any financial and technical plans, or explain the activities of the project, beyond a general reference to nature conservation.
Only recently, scientists confirmed the Congo Basin has the world’s largest tropical peatlands, a type of forested wetland that locks billions of tons of carbon in the soil, accumulated as semi-decayed organic matter over thousands of years.
Two of the titles in Oshwe used to belong to KFBS’s sister company Sodefor, until Nyamugabo awarded them to the Congolese company Groupe Services as logging concessions in June 2020.
It is in this context that the government admitted “the illegality of many contracts,” just two weeks before the COP26 climate summit in October and November 2021.
At the climate summit, the European Union and the United Kingdom pledged $1.5 billion to protect the forests in the Congo Basin, while the Central African Forest Initiative announced a 10-year agreement, with $500 million earmarked for the first five years.
The measure was put in place 20 years ago to prevent the plundering of equatorial forests following the Second Congo War, which officially ended in 2003.
“Truth is, keeping in check a logging concession is easier than controlling a forest that is open to all sorts of informal activities, including unregulated logging by local communities and even organized groups,” says François Busson, a natural resources expert with experience in the Central African Forests Commission.
In a separate statement, KFBS said the environment ministry led by Nyamugabo did not consider the transfer of the concessions as new allocations under the law.
The first requirement of the $500 million deal with CAFI was the publication, before the end of 2021, of an audit conducted the previous year by the country’s General Inspectorate of Finance .
The DRC government ended up issuing the document two months after the chief of the EU delegation in the DRC had requested it.
However, FRM was dropped from the shortlist after a researcher pointed out an overt conflict of interest in a chain of emails, seen by this reporter, that were sent to AFD and Congolese officials.
According to the researcher, the firm appears to have started its hiring process for the program more than four months before the ministry launched a tender for the contract.
Each credit corresponds to 1 metric ton of avoided carbon dioxide emissions with respect to business-as-usual projections.
Records show the Isangi REDD+ project, in the northern Tshopo province, has sold more than 1 million carbon credits to dozens of entities from around the world.
travel firm Exodus Travels; Swedish logistics company Scanlog; and universities such as Marymount California University and the University of Tasmania.
Unlike stocks traded on an exchange, prices for verified carbon units can be privately negotiated, meaning it is not possible for observers to calculate how much an entity has earned by adding up the credits it has sold.
“I had no idea they had been selling credits,” he said, although a monitoring report from the project claims it engages frequently with him and other authorities.
Carbon credits belong to the Congolese state, and private operators must seek authorization to sell them before reporting transactions.
As it is now, no one person or institution in the DRC appears to have a full picture of who is selling what, and how much profit they are making, if any.
But according to the DRC’s National REDD+ Coordination, the body responsible for monitoring carbon credit finances in the country, it holds no data on the project.
The project has not yet reported annual net income and has not activated profit-sharing payments with the government, it said, but is honoring the agreements with communities.
The announcement from Bazaïba, known locally as ‘The Iron Lady,” came as President Tshisekedi called for a twentyfold increase in the price of carbon credits to keep the world’s second-largest rainforest standing.
“Companies and opportunistic public officials can easily take advantage of people’s ignorance on carbon markets,” said a REDD+ expert from the finance ministry, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
Few investors have been in the DRC longer than members of the Blattner family.
“I call this the wild west,” he said at the time, unwittingly speaking for generations of foreign investors to come.
The Congo Basin has the world’s largest tropical peatlands, a type of forested wetlands that lock billions of tons of carbon in the soil, accumulated as semi-decayed organic matter over thousands of years.