Forest and Savanna Restoration Investment Program

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The DRC Forest and Savanna Restoration Investment Program (FOREST) is a comprehensive initiative that aims to improve the management of forested landscapes and enhance the livelihoods of forest-dependent communities in seven densely populated provinces along the southern border of the DRC's rainforest. The constantly growing local population, which relies on shifting cultivation and harvesting trees for subsistence and sale of foodstuffs and wood energy, is the primary driver of deforestation and landscape degradation in these priority provinces under the DRC CPF 2022-2026.To address these issues, the project will support local communities and the private sector in expanding agroforestry and forestry value chain investments in degraded savanna areas to supply high-demand local markets with more sustainably produced goods. Investments will also integrate approaches to restore degraded ecosystems, protect ecologically valuable ones and ensure the continued provision of critical ecosystem services. Participatory land use planning will be promoted to enhance local governance of natural resources in the targeted landscapes and support a collective vision of trade-offs between economic growth, improved livelihoods, and conservation of natural resources. To achieve higher impact on deforestation and improved livelihoods, the project will complement supply-side measures with approaches aimed at reducing the demand for wood fuel. This will involve promoting access to modern energy cooking services, upgrading cookstove technologies and industries, and modernizing the biomass fuel sector. To sustain and scale up these efforts longer term, the project will support the DRC authorities’ objective to promote result-based climate finance (RBCF) and carbon finance. This includes supporting authorities and stakeholders in building capacity and strengthening governance frameworks for measuring, reporting, and verifying (MRV) climate results as well as methodologies and tools to incentivize communities and the private sector to sustainably manage forests and their ecosystem services.