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Project Description
The Mai-Ndombe ER Program is the first jurisdictional REDD+ program for results-based payments at
large scale in DRC and the Congo Basin and among the first ones in Africa. Its goal is to develop a
provincial-level model for forest-smart development that provides alternatives to deforestation while
simultaneously mitigating climate change, reducing poverty and securing local livelihoods, enhancing the governance of natural resources and protecting biodiversity.
The scope of this project is the carbon finance transaction, which is one aspect of the broader MaiNdombe
ER Program. The project concerns the payments for verified ERs resulting from activities
implemented under the program. Other projects of the program include, for example, investment
projects, such as the FIP, to support ER Program implementation.
In order to address the drivers of deforestation and forest degradation and generate ERs, the ER
Program’s intervention strategy is three-fold: (i) re-orienting agricultural production on forest land
towards practices that are less land-consuming than slash-and-burn farming, such as perennial crops
and agroforestry; (ii) providing incentives for the conservation and sustainable management of forests
through REDD+, and (iii) supplying the demand for wood products from the province-city of Kinshasa
through reforestation and regeneration activities on savannah lands. More specifically, the ER Program
will implement a balanced combination of enabling and sectoral activities.
Enabling activities aim at creating favorable conditions and addressing underlying causes of
deforestation and forest degradation, which are critical for the project?s success. While measures to
address the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation, such as population growth, are
more complex and do not translate directly into ERs, they are crucially important to achieve the
intended paradigm shift towards forest-smart development at jurisdictional scale. The ER Program
contains four pillars of enabling activities:
(a) Land use planning, land tenure and governance: developing a participatory framework for the
sustainable management of natural resources, establishing Local Development Committees (LDCs),
developing simple management plans (SMP) and sustainable development plans (SDP) for strategic
investments at all levels (province, territories, communes), clarifying land tenure through participatory
planning methods, and promoting coordination across sectors;
(b) Capacity building: Strengthening institutional and technical capacities of decentralized state
services and local institutions, in particular LDCs and Agricultural and Rural Management Councils
(CARTs), building capacities of the central government to manage natural resources transparently, and
improving capacities of governmental agencies to control forestry and charcoal-making;
(c) Enabling conditions for alternative (forest-smart) economic activities: developing new agricultural
value chains for perennial crops, intended to substitute slash-and-burn farming, facilitating producers?
access to markets, improving local infrastructure and connectivity, and strengthening forest law
enforcement;
(d) Demography: Supporting family planning through the provision of information, awareness raising
and access to means of birth control, and promoting youth education programs.
Sectoral activities address the direct causes of deforestation and forest degradation and aim at
developing alternative economic activities in the following three sectors:
(e) Agriculture: Promoting agroforestry on savannah lands, and improving cultivation techniques and
pasture management, developing perennial crops (coffee, cocoa, palm oil and rubber) in forested
landscapes as an alternative to slash-and-burn agriculture;
(f) Forestry: Establishing PES schemes related to forest protection, supporting community forestry,
promoting conservation concessions and reduced impact logging in forest concessions, enhancing
afforestation/reforestation for timber production, and supporting the management of protected
areas;
(g) Energy: Developing assisted natural regeneration as well as afforestation/reforestation for charcoal
production, establishing sustainable business lines for biomass energy supply, and expanding the
dissemination of more efficient and cleaner cook stoves.
The implementation of a substantial part of these enabling and sectoral activities is secured through a
number of investment projects in the ER Program area.
The ERs will be verified against a reference level, which is estimated at 48 million tons CO2eq per year
for the reference period 2004-2014. The implementation of ER Program activities is expected to
generate 40.3 million tons CO2eq over five years (gross). The number of ERs for purchase by the FCPF
Carbon Fund as derived from the negotiations is 11 million tons CO2eq.
The project itself has two components related to the use of the ERPA payments in accordance with the
BSP. The first component comprises the fixed costs of running the ER Program and variable costs, which
are independent of performance. Component two is the implementation of the BSP to distribute
payments against performance, i.e. ERs against an agreed reference level for ER Program stakeholders.
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