The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is building on its long-standing collaboration with the Republic of the Congo's government to work together to identify key biodiversity areas (KBAs) in a country incredibly rich in biodiversity. The one-year KBAs identification program, launched officially on October 11th, aims to provide the precise location of places that contribute significantly to the global persistence of biodiversity.
KBAs can accelerate efforts to reverse the loss of nature by providing governments, private sector actors and others with an accurate data set to better inform future spatial planning decisions and their impact on biodiversity. KBAs also aim at enabling entities that may have negative impacts on nature to avoid or reduce those impacts in the places they would be most damaging.
No less than six ministries were attending the launch of the program in Brazzaville, including the ministries of hydrocarbons, mines, and forestry economy.
“This is proof of our commitment to the conservation of the biodiversity of our country's terrestrial, aquatic, coastal and marine ecosystems,” noted on this occasion the Minister of the Environment, Sustainable Development and the Congo Basin, Arlette Soudan-Nonault, under whose patronage this program will take place.
For 30 years, the WCS has been working closely with the Congolese government, helping to lay the scientific groundwork for the creation of the Nouabale-Ndoki National Park in 1993; the creation of the Ntokou-Pikounda National Park in 2012; the creation of the Ogooué-Leketi National Park in 2018; and, most recently, the creation of three marine protected areas.
Many sites in the Congo could qualify as KBAs, including under criterion C, which calls for the inclusion of outstanding examples at the global scale of still-natural and intact places that maintain fully functional ecosystems, essentially undisturbed by significant industrial human influence, such as Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park and Lac Télé Community Reserve, managed by the WCS since 1993 and 2001 respectively.
Other sites may also meet A1E criterion for their importance to the survival of critically endangered endemic species, such as Bouvier's Red Colobus, Piliocolobus bouvieri.
To ensure the effectiveness of this program, WCS Congo was able to count on the support of the KBA Secretariat, as well as the support of WCS Canada, one of the world’s leading program when it comes to the on-the-ground identification of KBAs, which just last week announced the first 73 sites that have been officially given KBA status across Canada while unveiling another more than 900 sites still being considered.
“This is one of the ways that WCS is working to advance critical international conservation commitments – by sharing practical knowledge about how to make conservation gains on the ground,” declared WCS Canada’s technical coordinator for the KBA project, Chloé Debyser.
Congo’s interest in the KBA process is a sign of the country’s commitment to addressing the global biodiversity crisis in the lead up to the fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, which will be held from December 7 to 19 this year in Montreal, Canada. Minister Arlette Soudan-Nonault explained that the KBA process will be an important tool for helping the country meet the “30 x 30” target of protecting 30% of the Republic of the Congo’s lands and waters by 2030.