Background

With an area of 2 345 409 km2, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is the second largest country in sub-Saharan Africa. An equatorial climate and low population density has allowed the DRC to preserve the largest tropical forest in the world – the basis of life for many threatened species such as the bonobo, gorillas, okapis - and a large savannah inhabited by giraffes, lions and rhinos. In 1974, the Democratic Republic of Congo was one of the first countries to ratify the Convention on the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. Five years later, the Virunga National Park – the first African national park – was inscribed on the World Heritage List (1979). Garamba, Kahuzu-Biega (1980) and Salonga National Park (1984) followed soon after. The Okapi Wildlife Reserve, became a World Heritage site in 1996. During times of peace as well as war, DRC has always been a keen adherent to the World Heritage Convention’s principles. Unfortunately, since 1994, the country got entangled in the Great Lakes conflict. This lead in 1996 to the start of an outright war in the country, driven both by internal conflicts as well as outside interference.

As a result of these conflicts, all five sites were progressively put back on the List of World Heritage in Danger (Virunga National Park in 1994, Garamba National Park in 1996, Kahuzi-Biega National Park and Okapi Faunal Reserve in 1997 and Salonga National Park in 1999) and remain there.

Objectives

The goal of the project is ensure the conservation of World Heritage Sites in the DRC both during periods of civil unrest and the long term, by mobilizing financial, logistical, technical and diplomatic support at the regional and international levels, to strengthen the conservation of the sites and ICCN (Institut Congolais de la Conservation de la Nature) as a whole. The project will also function as a learning process to inform efforts and develop mechanisms to conserve similar sites in conflict regions elsewhere in the world.

Specifically the project aims to :

• Bring direct field reinforcement, particularly through salary substitute support to site's staff and provision of key field equipment.
• Through diplomatic interventions to convince leaders and others authorities in all concerned States of the need to ensure the security of the working environment and for the conservation personnel and equipment ;
• To build personnel capacity through training and to establish collaborative programmes of long term training, surveillance and monitoring ;
• To survey post-war status and establish long term harmonised monitoring of the biodiversity in the sites (related projects SYGIAP http://geoweb.ugent.be and BEGo http://dup.esrin.esa.it/projects/summaryp55.asp )
• To supply timely communications to facilitate national and international response to address the urgent needs of the protection of the World Heritage Sites and the broader needs of biodiversity conservation in the DRC ;
• To promote programmes of collaboration with indigenous communities improving resource conservation ;
• To establish sustainable financing mechanisms to support the sites in the long term.

Description

In 2000, UNESCO and the United Nation's Foundation, set-up an innovator project "Biodiversity Conservation in Regions of Armed Conflict : Conserving World Heritage sites in the Democratic Republic of Congo". This pilot project of conservation of natural heritage in war times, was launched for four years.

UNESCO, ICCN, a range of international NGOs as well as the German Technical Cooperation (GTZ) jointly executed the US$2.9 million dollar project. The UNF Project, approved in November 1999 – a time when most other donors did not want to invest in DRC or were pulling out –has been critical to UNESCO World Heritage Centre, NGOs and ICCN holding the battle-lines from advancing too fast to destroy biodiversity and obliterate protected areas. The Government of Belgium was the first to join forces with the UNF Project, providing 300,000 Euros over four-years beginning in 2000 for community-support activities for conservation in and around the five World Heritage sites.

Since then, further interest on the achievements of the UNESCO/UNF/DRC Project has been building and possibilities of future support by the European Union, the World Bank (through the Global Environment Facility) and the German Government for Virunga, Kahuzi-Biega, Garamba and Salonga appear real. The UNF and the Government of Belgium, continue to provide encouragement through considerations of additional support for staff and project co-ordination Within the framework of the Congo Basin Initiative, launched at the Johannesburg Summit in August 2002, many projects have been launched sustaining conservation of World Heritage Sites in DRC. UNESCO, World Heritage Centre, ICCN and NGO partners agree that the time may be ripe for taking UNESCO’s efforts to build partnerships for World Heritage conservation in DRC to a new level.

Project Strategy

A two level strategy is followed. On an international level, political support for the conservation of the sites is gathered at all pertinent governmental levels within the Democratic Republic of Congo and within neighbouring states involved in the ongoing conflict. To do that, information is gathered on the state of conservation of the sites through the setting up of a monitoring programme. On the local level, direct support to conservation activities in the sites is provided, mainly targeted at the park rangers who currently receive no national salaries but have demonstrated their determination to assure protection of the sites. A special focus is put on increasing of the capacity of field staff to assure key park management operations under the present difficult conditions.