我要吃瓜

The CRAFT-Sustainable Development program will transform Central Africa’s Scientific Capacity to Protect Forests and Improve Livelihoods. It will facilitate the systematic monitoring of the integrated Congo Basin climate-forest-water-society system, and support leading research groups in the region to collectively train a new generation of science professionals. The program will provide underpinning data and understanding on the value and vulnerability of the Congo Basin, needed for policies that slow deforestation, improve livelihoods and support sustainable development. Investing in regionally owned expertise and integrated monitoring will maintain an indispensable flow of new data and advice for decades to come. The program has three main strands:

1) Understand the value and vulnerability of the Congo Basin. The program will enable 12 leading research groups at universities and research centres in DRC (4), Cameroon (3), Gabon (3), and Republic of the Congo (2), to lead data collection and analysis across the six themed Observatories identified in the CBSI Science and Capacity Plan: climate, hydrology, vegetation, biodiversity, land use and land cover change, and socio-ecology8 . This provides integrated monitoring and understanding of the Congo Basin system, a necessary precursor for better evidence-based management policies.

2) Build scientific capacity and capability in the Congo Basin. Over five years we will train a total of 22 PhD level scientists and 11 MSc level scientists from the region across the six Observatories, representing a total of 95 person-years of new scientific training. These are a mix of Congo Basin university-registered MSc and PhD scientists, with substantial periods in the UK for training, and UK-university registered ‘sandwich’ PhDs with a Congo Basin institution. This provides a new model of generating scientific capacity to deliver a new cohort of experts for the region to advocate for evidence-based management policies.

3) Translate science for policy and community action. A CBSI annual conference, including CBSI scientists, civil society, and policy advisors will enable the co-creation of our plans to make our findings as policy relevant as possible, and explain our discoveries to those who can best make use of them. Outside of this forum we work closely with the Congo Basin Forest Partnership to feed our knowledge into improved forest management. The Socio-Ecological Observatory brings participatory science methods into communities to empower them to make the best use of evidence to protect their forested lands.

Each Observatory is co-led by two leading scientists employed in different parts of the Congo Basin, to embed working at the regional-scale and securing best practices across the region. Each is supported by an internationally recognised expert from a UK University, inverting the usual North-South hierarchy. Each Observatory is developed from the bottom-up, building on existing efforts and the expertise of the leading researchers. Each Observatory will train 3 to 6 scientists to collect high-quality data, a well-established, synergistic and cost-effective way of building new knowledge, capacity and capability at the same time.

I will support the Biodiversity Observatory: Led by Prof Bila Inogwabini (Catholic University of Congo, Kinshasa, DRC) and Dr Emmanuel Abwe (U. Lubumbashi, DRC). Together, we will address how land mammals (using camera-traps networks) and fish (using surveys) are impacted by the major habitat modifiers of our time: forestry, agriculture, mining, roads and cities, as both are important sources of income and protein sources for many local communities, but also maintain critical ecosystem services for forest, wetland and river health. Balancing sustainable biodiversity use and conservation is key.