Exploring migration, habitability and climate change in the future – scenarios for Africa and Asia
Insight by Emily Wright O'Kelly, Tobias Bernstein
News publ. 10. Oct 2011
During a two-day workshop held on 2-3 October, 2011 in Goma adelphi presented land use mapping products and reports produced by the FP7 research project G-mosaic to national conservation agencies and organisations working in the North and South Kivu provinces, Democratic Republic of Congo. The workshop was jointly organized by adelphi, the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and officially opened by a representative of the Governor of the North Kivu province. The Ministry of Environment, Ministry of Mines, Ministry of Agriculture as well as 20 NGOs actively working in land conservation or land use planning, attended the workshop.
Since 2009, adelphi, JRC and other G-mosaic partners have been collecting and analyzing information from satellite images, cartographic databases, news reports, conflict databases and research studies to provide updated information on management of natural resources and conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Problems in resource management are intimately linked to political and social conflicts at local, regional and national level. While social and ethno-political issues have played a major part in the conflicts, the allocation of profits from exploited natural resources has been a factor in the continued existence of multiple armed groups. At the same time, the aftermath of conflict continues to hamper the development of a transparent and accountable management of the country’s natural resources and favours unsustainable and harmful exploitation of minerals and forests. Given that most of the Congolese population depends on agriculture, hunting, fishing and forestry for their livelihoods, greater sustainability in resource use, and a more equitable distribution of revenue generated from resources, are urgently needed.
The Congolese Institute for Nature Conservation (ICCN), the International Rescue Committee (IRC), Conservation International (CI), Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Tayna Center for Conservation Biology (TCCB) cooperate with local communities to help conserve biodiversity and at the same time to support alternative livelihood activities. All these organisations create and use maps as part of their resource management activities; for instance, maps are regularly needed to communicate to members of local communities the location and extent of conservation areas. The conservation organisations have extensive field data and expert knowledge of their regions, and so were able to help in correcting the maps produced by the G-mosaic partners during the workshop. G-mosaic partners could contribute to the work of the conservation organisations by providing an updated land cover map based on satellite images from 2010. Such updated geospatial information on DRC is difficult and expensive to obtain. G-mosaic partners also provided mapping tools and two training sessions for the workshop participants.