Government, donors sign Congo rainforests deal

The Gabon Government and a group of donors signed an agreement to protect 34 000 square km of the Congo Basin rainforests in the country, reports Energy News Africa. The plan, dubbed ‘Gabon Infini’, will combine $94m of donor money such as that from the Global Environment Facility or the Bezos Earth Fund over a 10-year period with $86 000 000 of government funding. The model, known as ‘Project Finance for Permanence’, aims to finance national parks and tackle elephant poaching while boosting eco-tourism. Brazil also announced on Monday a similar deal covering almost 243 000 square km of Amazon rainforest. Kenya and Namibia were also finalising agreements. Gabon is a vital ecological anchor in the vast Congo Basin. Nearly 90% of its land is covered in tropical rainforest. It is home to over half of the remaining African forest elephants and a quarter of the western lowland chimpanzees. The new plan is based on a ‘debt for nature swap’ that was completed only weeks before the military coup of 2023. In that deal, Gabon refinanced $500m of loans with a bond that set aside funds for coastal protection. Former Minister Maurice Ntossui Allogo who oversees the new conservation plan said that Tuesday's Letter of Intent Agreement marked ‘a crucial milestone’ for Gabon’s conservation drive. Ryan Demmy Bidwell of The Nature Conservancy, a non-profit organisation that has worked with the government to protect the forest, stated that Gabon is important because almost 90% of it is intact. He added that the Infini project would lead to the creation of new national parks, and other protected areas, so as to cover 30% of its rainforests, up from 15% at present.

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