Most deforestation in the DRC today is driven by the expansion of smallholder farming systems.
Each year, the country loses roughly 1,200 square miles of forest (0.20%), and this rate has remained constant over the last decade. The decline in the extent and quality of forests in the region increases food insecurity and destabilizes local markets, making some 6 million rural households progressively more vulnerable to the impacts of global climate change.
Integrating the protection, management, and restoration of both primary forest and biodiversity (nature based climate solutions) within a framework of economic growth and poverty reduction is the key to sustainable development. In the DRC, success hinges on local community empowerment and participation—not just as passive beneficiaries of policy, but as active leaders and managers in the process.
Our Work
Projet Équateur aims to promote investment in the conservation and regeneration of forest landscapes and biodiversity, improve livelihoods, and promote economic development in the DRC through scientific research, education, and capacity building.
Since 2011, we have operated Projet Équateur from a base of operations in Mbandaka, the provincial capital of Équateur. We work in partnership with the national and provincial governments, as well as other local stakeholders, to promote scientific approaches to land use planning and management for a low-emissions future. Activities are organized around three key areas:
- Researching investment in improved forest landscape governance and management to assess tradeoffs and create equitable incentives. We share knowledge critical to scaling the implementation of natural climate solutions, and develop measurable standards for a high-integrity carbon market and other performance-based finance.
- Strengthening land use planning and management processes to combat deforestation and biodiversity loss. We are trialing low-input food production technologies to improve food security and nutrition, and reduce the yield gap; introducing new cookstoves to better manage demands on woody biomass; and connecting commodity producers to markets to help generate greater household income.
- Developing models for a “Green Economy” using carbon credits and other performance-based mechanisms to finance sustainable forest landscape management. These include: integrating climate change mitigation and adaptation issues into provincial and national development planning; monitoring and evaluating emission performance from the land sector; and applying benefits sharing and payments for performance mechanisms to incentivize low-emission development.
Impact
This project is helping identify key pathways to the lasting protection of 643,000 km2 of primary forests at risk in the DRC, for the benefit of people and nature. Our science supports selecting and scaling pathways to improve food security and income generation for more than 6 million smallholder subsistence farms by developing the operational models and financial mechanisms needed to mobilize national policy and provincial plans for a sustainable forest landscape. These approaches can develop accountability and transparency in public policy and empower local communities to conserve forest resources and drive community development.
For more information, please contact:
Dr. Glenn Bush, Associate Scientist, gbush@woodwellclimate.org, 508-444-1570
Beth Brazil, Senior Director of Foundation Relations, bbrazil@woodwellclimate.org, 508-444-1549
Climate change intersects with global security in multiple ways, including threatening infrastructure and exacerbating existing societal stressors and regional instabilities.
While climate change has been identified by policymakers as a critical national security issue, granular climate impacts are rarely included in security strategy. In 2020, Woodwell Climate’s Government Relations and Risk teams began to address this gap through a series of case studies that combined cutting edge climate risk assessments and security analysis.
Our Work and Impact
We quantify and map key climate risks that have the potential to aggravate existing instabilities and tensions in the future. Our team has also provided analysis of climate risk to military installations for Defense Department decision makers.
Our case studies focused on the China-India border region (storymap), the Arctic (storymap), and North Korea (storymap). Our team also produced storymaps (no case study) related to water security issues in Iran and Türkiye.
That work has developed into a broader climate security expertise and our experts continue to provide this analysis to senior policymakers in the U.S. Congress and at federal agencies.
If you would like to connect with us about this work, please contact External Affairs Manager Andrew Condia at acondia@woodwellclimate.org.
The research team uses Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs), an AI-based pattern recognition tool, to analyze the behavior of the stratospheric polar vortex. This research has two goals:
- Develop a more comprehensive way to identify different disruptions to the stratospheric polar vortex. Current research methods only identify disruptions that lead to a reversal of wind direction from westerly to easterly in a specific latitude, missing other types of disruptions. The team’s approach provides a new, more complete listing of disruptions to the stratospheric polar vortex.
- Assess the potential for using SOMs to further analyze triggers and impacts of disruptions in the stratospheric polar vortex.SOMs may be able to help researchers isolate what triggers disruptions to the stratospheric polar vortex, relate extreme winter weather events to those disruptions, and even evaluate how well global climate models simulate linkages between the troposphere and stratosphere.
This work is supported by Woodwell Climate’s Fund for Climate Solutions.
A growing body of research is examining disruptive and abrupt shifts in weather extremes. Contributing to this work, the research team has developed a novel method to identify so-called weather whiplash events.
The team defines a weather whiplash event as a long-lived (4 or more consecutive days), continental-scale pattern in the upper-level circulation of the atmosphere that shifts abruptly (over 1-3 days) to a substantially different pattern, bringing a stark end to persistent weather conditions throughout the region.
This definition eliminates the possibility of misidentifying sharp, localized weather changes caused by features like fronts, discrete disturbances like tropical storms, and changes in low-level winds (e.g., shifting from onshore to offshore or from downslope to upslope).
To identify weather whiplash events, the team is using an AI pattern recognition tool called Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs). Unlike methods used in previous studies, this new approach does not rely on measurements or simulations of precipitation or temperature, so it avoids uncertainties introduced by instrument error, local influences, and deficiencies in models.
This tool allows us to analyze real-world data to identify weather whiplash events in the past. Then, the team applies the same approach to modeled simulations of past weather to see how well those models capture whiplash events, and to future modeled projections to investigate how the frequency of weather whiplash events changes under different emissions scenarios.
The research team is currently applying this method to three large (120° longitude) sections of the northern hemisphere—the northeast Pacific Ocean/North America, the North Atlantic Ocean/Europe, and Asia.
This work is supported by Woodwell Climate’s Fund for Climate Solutions.