Launching a Process to Further Protect the Congo Basin

By Harrison Nnoko Ngaaje, Ajemalebu Self Help (AJESH)  

At the 2025 Congress Drynet member Ajemalebu Self Help (AJESH) of Cameroon and a number of Co-sponsors proposed Motion 140, titled “Avoiding Irreversible Ecological Damage and Tipping Points in the Congo Basin: Urgent Assessment and Protective Measures.”

One of the central decision-making processes of the IUCN Congress is debating and voting on motions that, when adopted, become IUCN Resolutions or Recommendations (for external stakeholders) and guide IUCN’s and the global conservation community’s policy and program work.

The co-sponsors were a broad-based coalition of organizations from Africa, Latin America, and other regions, including Indigenous and local community organizations.

The motion was proposed because the licensing of oil blocks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo puts the Congo Basin’s forests and peatlands at risk of reaching ecological and hydrological tipping points, potentially triggering forest dieback, peat collapse, large-scale carbon release, and biodiversity loss. The areas of the oil blocks overlap with protected areas, intact forests and peatlands, creating urgent risks.

Motion 140 was submitted as an “emergency motion” because of the urgency for effective action and requests the IUCN Director-General and Members to initiate an urgent assessment of tipping-point risks in the Congo Basin. It calls on states, donors, and partners to expand the protection of intact forests, peatlands, and Indigenous/local community-governed territories in the Basin and urges the mobilization of adequate public budgets and private finance, and the strengthening of Indigenous and local community rights and governance.

After extensive debate the motion was adopted by the Members’ Assembly with 97% approval.

The Motion requests the IUCN Director General to urgently convene a Congo Basin Tipping Point Assessment Task Force mandated to rapidly assess climatic and ecological thresholds in forest and peatland ecosystems, identify and map hotspots of risk and deliver an interim science-based report with recommendations by the end of 2026.

In order to support the sorts of action needed to conserve the ecological integrity of the Congo Basin, the Motion urges the IUCN, Member States and partners to prioritise and help advance capacity building, including training programmes for local conservation organisations and support for Indigenous- and community-led monitoring, conservation and restoration efforts.

It also encourages governments, donors, multilateral institutions and private sector actors to mobilise and to increase finance for Congo Basin forest protection through for example, country packages for forests, nature and climate and urges international financial institutions, governments and private sector actors to align all investment flows with the precautionary principle.

The Congress set a clear roadmap for global conservation policy through these motions and resolutions. IUCN and its Member organizations are now committed to implementing these outcomes to strengthen biodiversity protection, climate resilience, and community-based environmental governance.

In a fast-changing world, with its insatiable appetite for energy resources, interventions like this are crucial to ensuring that we are able to analyse emerging realities and conserve the irreplaceable green lungs of the world’s second largest tropical forest biome. Being closer to these “on-the-ground” realities and impartial in terms of benefitting from resource exploitation, NGOs like AJESH play a crucial role as the eyes and conscience of the environmental movement.