The PROFEAAC project (Promouvoir et Formaliser l’Exploitation Artisanale du bois d’œuvre en Afrique Centrale – Promoting and Formalizing Artisanal Timber Exploitation in Central Africa) has just published two guides in comic strip form to explain how to set up a nursery and plant trees, based on its experience in the DRC.

CIFOR-ICRAF and its partners have been working for some fifteen years on the issue of combating illegal logging which remains an international priority as the domestic markets of Central African countries are supplied very largely by sawn timber of informal origin.

Launched at the end of 2019 and financed by the FFEM (French Funds for World Environment), the PROFEAAC project proposes an integrated approach to the formalization and development of artisanal timber harvesting, from the management of timber resources to the demand for sawn timber in domestic markets. Its overall aim is to reduce the degradation of rural forests in Central Africa by formalizing and rationalizing artisanal timber harvesting.

Over the last ten years, efforts and policies to promote the rehabilitation of forest landscapes have been on the increase, particularly in tropical countries. Unfortunately, although one of the pillars of forest restoration, the participation of local populations remains weak, or even lacking, in most tropical reforestation initiatives, particularly in Africa. This situation is in line with one of the objectives of the PROFEAAC project, which aims to deploy measures facilitating the planting of trees by populations in their customary terroirs.

Since 2020, CIRAD has been working to implement this approach in the Yalikandja-Yanonge District, located in the Yangambi Landscape in the DRC, following a series of steps to get customary landowners interested and then involved in the forest rehabilitation of some of their plots.

According to Emilien Dubiez of CIRAD, “too many forest restoration initiatives are launched without any analysis of the expectations, needs, perceptions, contexts, institutions or capacities of communities, and generally end in failure. Knowledge of the socio-environmental and economic contexts of intervention zones is an essential prerequisite for the deployment of forest restoration activities. Only technical itineraries adapted to these contexts and meeting the expectations of the local population will enable us to improve forest resource management in the long term“.

To meet this challenge, Dubiez and his team began with a diagnostic study of the practices, dynamics and knowledge of land and resource management in the eight villages selected for the site.

The second stage consisted in collecting requests for forestry rehabilitation volunteers from the people living in these villages. In 2021, nearly three hundred individual requests were received by the project, of which 106 were selected for support, and almost as many in 2022.