Belgium invests €4 million in UNESCO project turning Yangambi Biosphere Reserve into climate and biodiversity hub

Located in the heart of the Congo Basin, the Yangambi Biosphere Reserve is a biodiversity hotspot. It is home to more than 32 000 tree species that occupy more than 235,000 hectares, or 2,350 km². 

Yangambi is also a hotspot for Congolese scientific research. It hosts facilities of the Centre for Monitoring Biodiversity (Centre de Surveillance de la Biodiversité) at the University of Kisangani and the National Institute for Agricultural Research (Institut national pour l’étude et la recherche agronomiques, INERA).

A third partner in the project is the Regional Post-Graduate Training School on Integrated Management of Tropical Forests and Lands (Ecole régionale postuniversitaire d'aménagement et de gestion intégrés des forêts et territoires tropicaux, ERAIFT), which operates under the auspices of UNESCO from Kinshasa.

The distinctive Congoflux tower rises majestically above the forest canopy. It measures greenhouse gas exchanges between the rainforest and the atmosphere. These data will be of crucial importance in understanding the role that the Congo Basin plays in mitigating climate change. Much more is currently known about the Amazon basin’s role as a carbon sink.

The Congoflux tower was installed in 2020 by Ghent University in Belgium, a key partner in the project. The university collaborated in this endeavour with ERAIFT and INERA, among other partners. 

The first phase of the project was implemented over the past 18 months. A local team was first recruited to coordinate the project and share information with different stakeholder groups. In addition, both a Steering Committee and Scientific Committee were set up to provide expert guidance. These committees are made up of UNESCO staff, key partners and stakeholders. 

The project team has purchased spare parts to boost the Congoflux tower’s monitoring function. It has also rehabilitated one of INERA’s buildings which specializes in climate science, as well as the adjoining guest house for visiting scientists and the facilities of the Centre for Monitoring Biodiversity, which have all been equipped with solar panels. Ghent University is providing the climate science laboratory with state-of-the-art research equipment. A second INERA building will be equipped with solar panels during the second phase.

Sixteen local scientists have been trained how to pilot the drones which are monitoring the flora and fauna in the Congo Basin, as well as the status of rehabilitated lands. To make it easier for local scientists to move around the heavily forested territory, the project team has purchased a speedboat, two off-road vehicles and 12 motorbikes.

A 2023 study by Van Vliet et al.,  which used camera traps to assess the status of biodiversity in the Yangambi landscape, found it to be dominated by four small mammal species: a pouched rat (Cricetomys emini), the porcupine Atherurus africanus and two species of duiker, a small antelope (Philantomba monticola and Cephalophus dorsalis). The study confirmed the presence of four species on the IUCN Red List, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and three species of pangolin (Smutsia gigantea, Phataginus tetradactyla and Phataginus tricuspis).

The project team has been interacting with local communities to identify sustainable sources of food and income. Local agriculture will be supported in the second phase using seeds developed by INERA that are better adapted to the local environment and more productive, namely manioc (Manihot esculenta), corn (Zea mays), rice (Oriza sativa), melon (Cucumis melo) and peanut (Arachis hypogea). 

INERA will also accompany households in developing crops using techniques that respect the environment and will train farmers how to use biofertilizers and develop fish farming and animal husbandry. 

For its part, UNESCO has provided villages with guidance on how to form an association to gain greater financial autonomy. Six associations have been established since November grouping 250 members and other villages are keen to do the same. Each association has fixed a subscription for its members of up to US$7 per month, in order to amass a sufficient treasury to be able to distribute micro-credit loans to its members. 

In September, UNESCO will begin providing the members of these community associations with training in areas such as accounting and how to apply for funding and optimize the production chain for agricultural produce. Most households practice pig- and goat-farming. The project will also provide communities with training on how they can increase the size of their herds in an environmentally sustainable manner to generate more revenue. It is hoped that this additional income will allow more families to send their children to school.

‘Our association is looking forward to strengthening skills in accounting and in how to mount a micro-project and develop an investment plan’, says Liliane Otono Wendalituka, who heads the Yawenda group’s community association. ‘This will greatly help us to become autonomous, above all the women, who have welcomed this UNESCO initiative’, she adds.

At first, some communities had expressed concern that the project might prevent them from accessing their land, due to a lack of clear information about how the biosphere reserve’s zoning system worked. UNESCO, thus, undertook a campaign to explain the zoning system to villagers and schoolchildren. Staff explained that Yangambi, like all biosphere reserves, has a legally protected core area that is surrounded by a buffer zone where research and other low-impact activities are conducted. This buffer zone is, in turn, surrounded by a transition area where communities live. It is in this transition area that ‘green’ economic activities are encouraged.

‘In the project’s second phase’, explains project coordinator René Bernadin Jiofack Tafokou, who is based at UNESCO’s office in Kinshasa, ‘we shall be building on the foundations laid in the first phase’. 

‘We shall immediately begin training the members of the community associations’, he says. ‘We shall also be expanding our campaign to build awareness in the community of the zoning system and how communities can develop green activities to augment their income. We have already spoken to more than 4,000 villagers and schoolchildren. In the second phase, we plan to reach out to more people in churches, at the market, in additional schools and on university campuses’. 

In parallel, INERA will be developing new agricultural activities with interested villagers and our other partners will be undertaking studies and training to turn Yangambi into a research hub in biodiversity and climate science’. 

Over the next three years, the Centre for Monitoring Biodiversity will organize at least ten series of multi-resource inventories of the Yangambi forest landscape by using its biosecure field laboratory to monitor biodiversity at different levels – ecosystems, species composition, populations, etc –, as well as biodiversity and genetic indicators of its erosion. The centre will be collaborating in this endeavour with the Capacities for Biodiversity and Sustainable Development programme (CEBioS) run by the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. CEBioS will also support the centre’s economic assessment of ecosystem services in the biosphere reserve.

For its part, ERAIFT will be using its socio-anthropological expertise to train students and coordinate scientific research around the management of the databases collecting all the data from the CongoFlux tower, as well as data gathered by other stakeholders. 
As for Ghent University, it will be using remote sensing to simulate scenarios, in order to improve vegetation monitoring, in addition to providing support for Belgian and Congolese students and technology transfer.

A new partner, the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Musée royale de l’Afrique centrale), will be contributing to the project’s second phase via its wood biology laboratory, the only one of its kind in sub-Saharan Africa. Local scientists will use the laboratory’s state-of-the-art equipment to study different tree species, in order to improve understanding of their individual traits, growth patterns and vegetation history.