Overview

The Isangi project will protect a biologically diverse but threatened forest with thousands of rare and declining species of vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants while improving the livelihoods of people living of the region.  This project has led to additional forest and grassland carbon sequestration project at other locations in Africa.

The project is a joint venture with a Congolese logging company interested in reducing its logging activities in favor of carbon offset generation. We are also working with the local villages to improve agricultural land use, minimize forest degradation from charcoal production, and relieve the intensive hunting pressure on wildlife.  Social development initiatives include education, health care programs and community empowerment programs.

Critical Issues

The primary causes of forest degradation within the Isangi boundaries are logging and subsistence agricultural activities by the region’s inhabitants.

The demand for new farmland is increasing as the population grows, and older farms are losing their soil fertility and overall land productivity. Areas are becoming more degraded as demand increases for charcoal and land for slash and burn agriculture.

Additionally, without increased livestock production the population will continue to source a significant portion of its diet from the forest, further impacting many important native forest species.

Jadora's Solutions

This project protects a 1550 square kilometer biologically diverse but threatened forest with thousands of rare and declining species of vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants. It will improve the livelihoods of people living near and within the forest, and it has led to forest and grassland conservation projects at other locations in Africa

The Isangi REDD project is working with local villages to improve methods of agriculture, decrease the use of wood for fuel, and relieve the intensive hunting pressure in the forest.

We are also working with our partners to reduce the logging activities in a zero job displacement transition.

Over the life of the project we will improve the livelihoods of local people by implementing sustainable forest management practices, creating jobs, and improving education, health outcomes and nutrition in the local communities. Jadora is working with communities to integrate sustainable management with local knowledge and customs.

Forest Monitoring

The forest is being monitored using advanced remote sensing, a grid of forest carbon plots measuring the carbon content of the forest, and a suite of on-the-ground monitoring strategies to track farming activity and charcoal production within the project area, the reference area, and the leakage buffer

Jadora has recruited, equipped and trained teams of local foresters to conduct monitoring with oversight from the project management team to achieve the precision required by best practices. Forest growth is being modeled and verified using standardized permanent plots.

Community and Stakeholder Involvement

Three-dozen villages that are directly impacted by the project have been enlisted in forest protection development and monitoring activities.

The project establishes clear livelihood alternatives that offer local people the potential for prosperity, security and health.

These superior life strategies relieve pressure on the primary forest and wild animals upon which the local people currently depend for their survival.

Local people have been recruited and trained as forest evaluators, monitors and protectors and have received conservation and development education. This has created new job opportunities in a region where employment was previously limited to the logging and palm oil industries. The project is working on impacted land for small-scale farming, ranching and aquaculture activities to help protect the integrity of the primary forest.

Jobs have been created in forest assessment and management, construction, animal husbandry, agriculture, environmental services, equipment and facility maintenance/machinery and mechanics, alternative energy systems, communications, marketing and product distribution. The impacts of the program are being monitored through formal and informal consultative dialogue with the villages in community meetings, by surveys of households, at markets and paths to markets, and in health clinics and schools.  The program is mapping shifts in the economy away from forest products and toward low-impact alternatives.