WHRC's Sustainable Science Speaker Series - Dr. Nadine Laporte on Forests

Today I want to introduce Nadine Laporte, who will be giving our presentation today, the third in the series on sustainability. You may recall those of you who attended them all. The first one was on agriculture, sustainable agriculture, which I presented. The second was on sustainable fisheries which Toby McGrath presented. And now we're on to sustainable forest management and sort of the interaction of agriculture with forest management, the growth of agriculture and the demands that places on forests. And the part of the world where this is happening on the cusp of happening at an alarmingly rapid rate, we think in the near future is in Africa and specifically the Democratic Republic of the, of the Congo. And Nadine has devoted her career to studying Africa. She received her PhD from Toulouse, France in 1990 in tropical ecology and remote sensing. So using the tools of satellite images, satellites that orbit the Earth and take images of the Earth for studying the Earth, that was what she cut her teeth on and was her specialty. From her PhD work, she did postdoctoral work at NASA Goddard Space Flight center and also was a research associate at the University of Maryland before she came here to the Woods Hole research center in 2003 as an assistant scientist, now as an associate scientist. And she has worked in many different aspects of using remote sensing tools to study Africa. She's used them as part of a great apes project. She's participated in, in mapping and monitoring great ape habitat. She has also been a coordinator of what we call our Pantropical Scholars Program. And that has brought students and mid career individuals from NGOs from government agencies, from countries all across the tropics, from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and bringing them back repeatedly and training them in many of these techniques of using satellite imagery to study their forests. And most recently what you're going to be hearing about tonight is a new project that she and her colleagues, including Glenn Bush, who is sitting here, have started in the Congo, a new project that's part of, funded by an international bank on a project called the Congo Basin Forestry Fund. And I won't go any further there or I'd be stealing her thunder. So please welcome Nadine Ort.

Thank you. Good afternoon everybody. I'm very pleased to have have you today. It's such a beautiful day and coming to the center today is really great. My work here started 10 years ago. I started the Africa program. As Eric was telling you, I grew up in France, in a little farm in the southwest of France and always been interested about conservation, forest and, and when I did my PhD in Toulouse, it was the beginning of the space program in Toulouse. So I Thought that using satellite imagery was really interesting way to look at ecosystem forests and monitor them. So when I came here 10 years ago, most of our work was focusing on monitoring forests in Central Africa and Eastern Africa using remote sensing. And we were training people how to use these new tools that we were developing as scientists at the Woods Hole Research Center. But soon, working in the Congo, we saw that it was not enough to work just on the monitoring of the forest. It was very important also to work with local communities and forest people to help them to better manage their forest. So we work at both scale at the national level with the government, but we work also with local people, forest communities at the local level. And the project I'm going to be speaking about today is a project we developed with Glenn on working really with forest communities on sustainable development. So my talk will have four parts. First, I'm going to give you a rationale why it's important to work in the Congo, why it's important to develop a vision on what should be the future of this forest with the people, if you want to save it. And I will take the example of the Equator project in the Congo to illustrate the the work we are doing with forest communities. And finally, I will speak about some of our work in the future. So just a little bit of geography. Central Africa is, Oops, sorry, this doesn't work very well. So as you can see, Central Africa here has most of the forest cover of Africa in green.

You have the forest here, you can.

See most of the forest is in Central Africa. And drc, the former Zaire, which is.

The largest country in Central Africa, has most of these forest cover. It's very important to work in this country in terms of climate also, if.

You cut all these forests, you're going.

To end up with a lot of carbon in the atmosphere.

So it's really very important country to.

Work not just for helping people to.

Develop conserving the forest, but also is very important in terms of impact on the climate. So the country of the Congo is.

More or less 2.3 million square kilometers.

There's approximately 70 million people, but we don't know exactly how many. The last Census was in 1986. The capital is Kinshasa, and the same for Kinshasa. The statistics of population of Kinshasa varies from 8 million to 12 million people in the capital. So nobody knows. What we know from working. I've been working in the Congo for 20 years, is that things are changing very fast. The last time I was there, you can see, I think there Was like more than 30 hotels have been built in the last five years. Ten years ago, when I was going was just one hotel in Kim was called the Grand Hotel. Everybody was going there. And I think it's starting to change. In 2005, when you are going to the Grand Hotel, you can see it was full of Asian businessmen. So we are really, at the time was critical to be working in this country. If in the past, South America and Southeast Asia had very higher rate of deforestation. And Central Africa relatively low rate.

Because most of the deforestation is done by small farmers, Small farms. They clear around one to two hectares per year, which is very small. But you have millions of people cutting this forest. But it's not as much as industrial agriculture.

When you go in the forest and.

You have a tract and you have.

Built those there, you can do a lot of damage.

The people clear the forest just with machete. So there are labor, there is not much labor. And also they don't have the right tools. But right now we think it's changing very fast.

So like I was telling you, it's why it's so important to work in the Congo for climate and forest conservation. Reason The Congo has the largest carbon reservoir of Africa. It means that in the trees you have a lot of carbon. And when you cut the trees for agriculture, you burn them and this carbon goes in the atmosphere. So potentially, if all this forest is cut, it's going to have a very big impact on our climate. Also, it's going to have a huge impact on. On the forest communities. Because the people rely on the forest for their livelihood. They need the forest. They need all the products coming from these forests to survive. So if they destroy the forest in the short term, in the long term, it's going to be not sustainable for them either. In terms of biodiversity. It's also very important country. It has the highest concentration of mammals and birds in Africa. In terms of plant diversity.

It's the third country after Madagascar, which is the highest one in South Africa.

And in terms of combined biodiversity of.

Plants and animals, it's the fifth country in the world in terms of biodiversity. So that's a very high biodiversity. And as I was mentioning it, we think it's really at a critical moment.

Some people are saying that the Congo.

Might be the Brazil of tomorrow. In the sense that you might observe very high rate of deforestation in relation to the expansion, explosion of industrial agriculture in the country.

And.

And if we wish, Congo has been struggling for many years with political instability and wars. We wish them Economic development. We hope, as an institution, that we can help them to develop while maintaining their forest and their biodiversity. So that's really our big goal, the big challenge. How we can help these countries today while maintaining, of course, and challenge.

So what are the root. The root of the problem, why people are cutting these forests? So you have three main reasons. The first one are economic. You have lots of logging activities. So people cut the wood. And a lot of this wood is exported to European markets, Japan, China. So it's one of the source of deforestation. Another source is poor governance. Often people don't know how to manage this forest. And if you had good governance, you could have better outputs. I can take an example in. In the case of the Ecuador province where we are working. The government of Congo changed logging laws in 2006. They reduced by 50% the total amount of forest for logging, which is a very good thing. But at the same time, the problem is that it was a vacuum of power. And at the same time, a small Chinese company went into the region, make special deals with the governor and went to log illegally. So all the people who were logging legally, who had this large logging concession could not work anymore because they were following the law. So they closed the company, waiting for the ban on logging to stop. But some people who don't care about the law went there, make special deals with the governor and have been cutting the forest since. So even if you had a good incentive, a good law, they were not able to implement the law and open. It was a vacuum, open the place to a lot of illegal loggers. Who just move in when the good company could. So it's very complex. Governance is a big impediment to do forest conservation. Finally, population growth. You have a lot of people and they need the forest and they need also to cut it to grow crops. They grow manioc, they grow corn. They grow all what they eat every day. So it's very important to help them to grow crops in a different way. Because the population growth is increasing rapidly. So they have 3.6% demographic growth. I think it's really high. And in addition to this loss of forest and habitat, which is very important for the climate and the people, There is also an impact on the biodiversity. When you cut the forest, the species are losing their habitat. So there is a lot of impact on also biodiversity. Also, when I was telling you the logging. They build a lot of logging road in this forest. Which make accessible areas that were never accessible before. So they take this road and go do a lot of poaching there, it has a huge impact also on the.

Deserts of this forest. So deforesting is not just an impact on the forest, but also on all.

The animals and the people who live there.

This is a map to show you the density of population in the Congo and where you should expect the highest rate of deforestation related to population expansion. So in the east you have very rich soil, it's volcanic soil. And you have population density. Up to 300 people per square kilometer is a very high population density. And most of the forest of this area, even in protected area, with the exception of Yerunda national park, still have some forest. The other area with a lot of population here, the transition between the forest and the savannah has very high population. And also a lot of the forest has been cleared.

It's kind of the area of production.

Of food for Kinshasa, which is here. So for the projects with Glenn, we decided to work in two different areas.

Congo is gigantic country.

The equator province where we are working. So it's a state, let's say like Massachusetts, it's the size of France, just equator. And we decided to work in two locations, which is Bandaka here, which is along the Congo river and the other one is Gemena. So just to illustrate how it different these two locations here I show some work we've been doing with Landsat imagery to look at deforestation with people at the University of Maryland.

So you can see that the Mandaka.

Region and the Gemena region are very different. You can see one has a lot of green, which is the forest, and the other one has a lot of white, which is non forest like savannah type of environment.

And you can see that the interface.

Between forest and savannah is very different between the two places. This place has very low population density. This one has very high population density. And you can see that the red zone here were forests as nuclear between 2000 and 2010.

So you can see that it's active deforestation here.

While here it was more past deforestation. People have been converting deforest long time ago.

And when we go in Gemena, when.

You speak with people, they tell you they are suffering from climate change already they have a lot more fire when they need wood, they have to go very far from the city to find wood. They're really interested to work with us on projects to reforest and things that are going to help them to restore their watershed. They are very conscious about what they've been using and what needs to be done now to regain here. It's very different. The Forest is managed. One forest, it's more difficult to cut. And people don't realize. People don't realize yet that the forest can never end.

Often people who live in the forest.

Like eventually they think that the forest will be always people. People don't realize that something has changed until it happened. And it's a very. It's really obvious when you go to these two different places, speak to the people and see how they are facing the loss of forest. Very different things. So here it's an illustration that will look like a different.

So basically people.

These trees are cut with machete. So it's kind of like a large long knife this size. And they cut very large logs.

So they cut them and they burn them.

And by burning them they bring nutrients and they can increase the yield in their crop. Also often what they do, they. They leave the logs and the branches like that. Because it's a natural barrier to animals. Because if you have corn fields or manioc field, an elephant or some wildlife is very interesting. It changes our diet, right? So by doing that, it's like a natural barrier for the animals to not grow. So it looks really messy, but it's very efficient. And. And also it's good if they want to do agriculture for several years at the same place. Since they're going to burn these logs slowly every year. It brings back some nutrients to the soil which is impoverished every year after the crop. So it's called traditional slash and burn agriculture which gone everywhere in.

I guess.

The easiest way to maintain some kind of soil activity in.

After generally two or three years, these fields are abandoned and are led to grow back to some kind of forest state. We call that in our jargon, secondary forest. It's not like the original forest, but it has pretty large trees. And they cut them again and do agriculture again. So that's the cycle. So this is another illustration of difference between Gemena and Bandaka. So in Gemena, like all the white areas, this is large savannah areas that you were saying on the satellite imagery with this forest only along rivers. And you can see in Bandaka you have a lot of forest and carbon. Even if the forest has been degraded. In this image you can see it's very different location. So forest also is very important to work in different location to see how we should do different activities to either maintain the forest, we restore the forest. In Bandaka, the main driver of change is rice agriculture. These are big field of rice. And Ingemena historically has been more traditional agriculture for coffee and manioc. And this kind of agriculture. So this is another view showing you the rice field in Bandaka. And another problem also that we are facing now is the expansion of palm oil, which is new. It devastated most of Southeast Asia forest and now it's moving in Central Africa. Originally, palm oil actually was. The species were cultivated in Southeast Asia, were initially grown in Congo. During the colonial period, Belgian scientists started this palm oil palm cultivar. They were sent to Indonesia where they were used to have this large palm oil plantation. And now the cultivars are coming back, improved cultivars from Indonesia are coming now in the Congo to have this large palm oil plantation. So at the beginning I was saying what is important is to develop this vision with the people. We think that if you just go in communities and just come with solution that's not going to work, you, you really have to go there and speak with them about what they think are the solution and help them to develop this vision of what they want the forest to be and how they want to develop. So really the approach of the Woods Resource center is to bring education, information, science and really help them to move towards sustainable development. A lot of the projects in, in Africa or in the tropics failed because I think you arrive like I'm a French person or an American. You think that you know better than the local people. And I think that's a big problem because they have lots of knowledge. And what is very challenging is how you can combine our knowledge with their knowledge and identifying together solution. So I think we have a very different approach. And it was really difficult to find money for this project because most of the development projects they want to know in advance what you're going to do. So they want to know how many trees you're going to plant, how many schools you're going to help with, how many farmers you're going to give compensation. And we were like, we don't know. We want to go in the villages, speak with the people and identify for each communities that might be different. As you saw, the landscape and the ecosystem are very different. So we cannot come with all the solutions. We really have to work towards those. So when we launched this office in the Congo in March, so we flew with Glenn and Amanda and a couple of other people from the project. So we landed in Kinshasa, which is the capital. And after we flew to Bandaka and Gemina, this is more or less like flying from Madrid to Brazil. I guess it's not a very good example for American, I would say from, I guess Florida maybe to North Carolina, like that and when we arrived there in Bandaka, the first thing we did, we organized workshop capacity building workshop with our partners who are working with religious organization, universities and the Jardin Botanic. So the first week we spent about discussing about the problems and how potentially we can find solutions. So this gentleman is a forester. He work for the government. This gentleman is a student. He's doing his PhD in Norway and is a social economist. This gentleman is an agroforester. And this gentleman is a botanist. So really the team is very interdisciplinary. We have people who have knowledge about people and forest ecosystem, people who know about ecology, people who know about economics. So we brainstorm together for a week. We had a nice discussion outside in the Jardin Botanique. This is a lady who started her own NGO who is doing forest plantation. So she came also to explain what she's doing and how we can help her in her work. So it's really bringing together local communities, scientists. And this is the place where we were having lunch every day on the Rookie river, which is one of the tributaries of the Congo, where we are doing also carbon measurement. We are looking also at carbon in rivers, but that's another project. And the second week we did the official launch with the Minister of the Environment. And this is. This is a photo with all our team. So you have Glenn, which is here, and Amanda also, which is at the Wizard Center. And the other people are either student government people or scientists who work at the Botanical Garden. So what are we doing right now? So we opened this office in Bandaca. This is a photo of our office. This is our logo on the gates of the place. You cannot imagine it's a lot of work to open an office in the Congo. It sounds like opening an office in Mashpeed. It's not exactly the same thing. So it was a lot of work. I mean, it took us like two years to do all the paperwork and everything to be able to operate. So right now what we want also, like the center is really an example of green energy. We want to also show people how it's important to do green development and have green buildings. So we are buying solar panels. We are trying to get the Internet, which is a big problem there. Up to now the project officer has been working from WWF offices because he still don't have Internet. So setting up the office, coordinating with all our partners. And the first thing we really have to focus on is to concentrate on outreach about forest conservation. And this project is about red. Red stands for reduction of emission from deforestation and degradation. And It's a new mechanism, it's a carbon finance mechanism that will allow country who are interested to deforest less to get the compensation. So we work at the national level with the government in 2007 for the conference of the parties. But now we want to work also at the local level with forest communities to see how this mechanism actually is going to work with local population. Because right now nobody knows how it's going to work. People have fear that the money is never going to get to the small farmers. And as you know, there's lots of corruption in this country. So everybody's worried that the money, money is going to go to the government, central government and never reach the small people. So we are there to see how we can scale up and scale down REDD as a new finance mechanism to conserve forest. Up to now you don't have lots of finance mechanics to conserve forest. Connie is here, she's interested by looking at ecotourism. It's one possibility. But the carbon finance, if it works, it's going to open a large amount of money that maybe we have a chance to save this forest up, level with forest communities to see how this mechanism actually is going to work with local population. Because right now nobody knows how it's going to work. People have fear that the money is never going to get to the small farmers. And as you know, there's lots of corruption in this country. So everybody's worried that the money, money is going to go to the government, central government and never reach the small people. So we are there to see how we can scale up and scale down REDD as a new finance mechanism to conserve forest. Up to now you don't have lots of finance mechanics to conserve forest. Connie is here, she's interested by looking at ecotourism. It's one possibility. But the carbon finance, if it works, it's going to open a large amount of money that maybe we have a chance to save this forest. Up to now there is not much money. With the international crisis, most of countries didn't give very much money and there is a green fund for climate but nobody has put money in it yet. And the Congo also is starting its Congo Fund for Red. And I think Norway already said I think they're going to put in like 200 million but it's not enough money. They need way more money if they want to be successful in terms of science and policy. Glenn and a student from Cameroon have been starting. It's very important if you do a project to have a baseline, you want to Know what is the impact of your project on both the ecosystem and the people. So again, it's a big difference with lots of these development projects because they don't look at what the status before and after. They just do things and there is not much accountability. The money is spent and if it works, it works. If it doesn't work, they have no way really to measure anything. So for us it's very important to have this baseline going to allow us to measure our success, but also to redirect things to reevaluate as the project go what needs to be done. At the center. We've been working with remote sensing and we have been doing estimation of emission of CO2 using satellite imagery. So we are doing also work in terms of quantification of emission. Because red, the compensation is a function of how much emission you are emitting. So for example, let's say you are emitting 100 million ton of CO2 per year. You need to find a target and say okay, my target is going to be 50 million. So you have to prove that every year you are emitting 50 million ton of CO2 less. So it's why we need also this remote sensing monitoring system to help you to quantify emission. Because almost impossible to do from the ground. And in terms of policy engagement, you know that for us it's very important to do our science and that it's using the target and say okay, my target is going to be 50 million. So you have to prove that every year you are emitting 50 million ton of CO2 less. So it's why we need also this remote sensing monitoring system to help you to quantify emission. Because almost a. So we work a lot also with the Ministry of Environment, also with the Prime Minister and with the un red. UN is united nation for redd. They selected eight countries I think important for RED and Congo is one of them. And they are the one in charge of the national office in Kinshasa. So we work a lot with them too. So the challenges to run this project and do RED are immense. But in this slide I tried to summarize two types of challenges. First is finance and administration. So there is a very high level of bureaucracy. Like I was telling you, it took us more than two years to set up the office and get the project starting. But at the same time now we are realizing why this bureaucracy is necessary in such because there is so much corruption that you really need to document everything and to make it very hard to people to appropriate illegally money. So you have all these Steps who make very, very difficult to take the money for things that the money is not supposed to be allocated to. So in a way, this bureaucracy is extremely heavy. But there is a reason for that. It's like a safeguard for corruption. Weak financial institution. RED is a carbon finance system to save the forest. But there is no banking in this country. There is less than 2% of the population who has a banking account. In the Congo, most of the people live with less than $1 a day. You don't need a bank for that because they need the dollar every day to feed their family. So it's a big challenge. So as we work on redd, we need to find a way to either find institution or creative an institution that will help us to channel the money to the local people. These economies, you don't have a lot of money in these economies. People exchange lots of goods. People are extremely poor people. So doing a carbon finance system in this community is extremely challenging. Lack of transparency and governance. I gave you this example with the logging company and the governor. So that's a big problem. Governance is a huge problem. But again, we are putting in place safeguard to, to avoid this problem. Project implementation, the project itself, like, you know, the communities, again, to have a success, you really need to engage people. So we need to find processes where people are really going to take the project for themselves. They're not going to say, you know, it's a project of whrc. They have to say, that's my oops, sorry, it's my project and I stand for it. So this is what we need to work at the beginning to make sure that they feel it's for them, it's not for us. And that's, you know, it's not easy because lots of these communities, they lack trust. They don't trust the government, they don't trust anybody. So that's a big challenge. And also the ability of this community to manage a project after we are gone. Most of these development projects, I don't know if you've been in Africa, but you have three years, the project is there, you run the project, you leave and the project is dead because they didn't put in place really the people who could manage a project when you are gone. So that's something also, we have to start from the beginning if you want to have a success. We really need to build the capacity of people to continue to run projects while you're gone. So it's not in three years. The project is three years. It's not in three years that you can do that, you need maybe 10 years. So we are looking also for funding and other projects to continue to do that on the long term, because that's also another problem. The funding, often it's on the two or three years cycle and it's not compatible with really development project because you have to be there for a long time. So that's another challenge. And promoting accountability. Like I was telling you, lots of projects, there is no baseline, nothing. People get rewarded even if there is failure. So we need to change this mentality where you always get money even if you do bad things. So that's also a big challenge. So in terms of future, we're going to focus on helping these forest communities to get the registration of the REDD project because it's very complicated that they cannot do it themselves. We're going to work on identification of the best compensation system. Like I was telling you, we don't go there telling you should do this or that. So in some cases, in some cases a direct payment paying people to defer less might work. But in some cases they might want a loan to send their kids to the university, or they want a better school, or they want access to health or insurance, we don't know. So it can be other type of compensation, not necessarily money, but something they need in the community. And we want to make sure that we are here for the long term because we realize that RED is not going to work in three years. We think we need at least 10 years working with these forest communities. If we want to save these forests. It's not going to work overnight. You cannot ask people to run before they learn to walk. And often these projects are like that. You want people to, but they even don't know how to walk. So it's important to be there long term in terms of proposal and fundraising. We are working at the center, we fundraise, we have government money. For example, most of my research is funded by NASA and also nsf, but also foundation. Right now we are developing a proposal to work on the interface, the exchange of carbon between the watershed and the river, which will be complementary to this project where we're going to bring more science. We want to have a science center where people can be trained. So we're going to have more science. We are planning also to work more on biodiversity. The funding we got is mainly on sustainable development and they are not very interested by biodiversity. But we recognize it's very important and we are hoping that we can send a proposal to the DiCaprio foundation soon to help us to work more on biodiversity with local population in this region also. And we are looking also for other source of funds to increase education and outreach, which is really, we have a little bit of money to do that, but we realized that we need a lot more funds to do really an impact in terms of forest conservation, education and outreach. So the name of our project in Lingala is called Zambamalamu, which means the forest is good. So I would like you to helped me to make it a successful project. And I would like to thank you for coming tonight. And I think now we can have some questions. And thanks again. And if you want to volunteer or take action and work with us, there is so much work. So if you're interested or you want to visit us in the Congo, that's with pleasure. Thank you.