The Dynafac collective launches its website, helping deliver sustainable management for the Congo basin forests

The Dynafac collective comprises actors and institutions in the forestry environment throughout Central Africa, working for better forestry management and planning. Its goal is to facilitate the exchange and harnessing of data gathered from research conducted on the forests by the public authorities in each country. Among those featured on the Dynafac website are the various projects led by Dynafac and supported by the FFEM.

• The DynAfFor project seeks to improve scientific and technical knowledge on forest dynamics to improve decision-making tools for forestry planning while mobilising actors in the enhancement of planning practices.

The Congo Basin is home to an exceptionally rich concentration of biodiversity, threatened by intensive forestry operations. To encourage sustainable management of the forests in Central Africa DynAfFor fosters scientific research that provides for better understanding of the environment, and puts in place tools for the monitoring and sustainable exploitation of the forests by both private enterprise and public administration. This project also allows local economic development and the redistribution of the resources generated by the forestry sector.

• The P3FAC project (Public Private partnership for sustainably managing the forests in Central Africa) is an extension of DynAfFor and focuses on the forests of the five nations in Central Africa: Cameroon, Congo, Gabon, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which between them share almost 10% of global biodiversity. The objective is to preserve this ecosystem while allowing the development of a sustainable economy based on the responsible exploitation of tree species and non-wood forestry products (NWFP). To achieve this, the P3FAC project relies on scientific data to establish forestry development schemes which ensure long-term management planning. To this is added the ambition of promoting dialogue and feedback from experiences gained across the three tropical basins of Africa, Asia and the Americas.

The Dynafac site also presents a third project supported by the FFEM.

• The North Congo forest landscapes project, whose objective is the maintenance of ecological balance and ensuring the rational development of the entire North Congo landscape.

This project concentrates its activities in the Republic of the Congo, where relatively well-preserved regions can still be found. It adopts an integrated approach to regions identified as “landscape”, by taking into account all the uses made of the space. It contributes to combating poaching, concentrating agricultural and forestry activities in community development areas and around built-up areas, and to sustainable forest management, aligning biodiversity conservation with economic and social development.