CoForChange: How, why and where will tree species survive increasing pressure: providing diagnosis and decision-making criteria to attenuate the effect of global change on biodiversity in the Congo basin forests.
Coordinator: Dr. Sylvie Gourlet-Fleury
Participating countries: FR, UK
Link to Presentation
The Congo Basin's tropical moist forests (TMFs), of world importance, are at risk of being severely degraded and fragmented in the near future through global change – anthropogenic pressure and climate change.
Title: How, why and where will tree species survive increasing pressure: providing diagnosic and decision-making tools to attenuate the effect of global change on biodiversity in the Congo Basin forests (CoForChange)
Project
Context. The Congo Basin’s tropical moist forests (TMF), of world importance for their diversity and their major ecosystem services, are experiencing past and ongoing effects of climate and anthropogenic changes. How, why and where will tree species survive a drying trend and an increase in resource use in this region is a challenging issue for Europe – both consumer and producer of african timber - , most involved in policy-making on biodiversity conservation, sustainable forest management and carbon storing issues.
Objectives. To address the challenge, CoForChange has three objectives:
(1) to elucidate whether climate or anthropogenic disturbance is the main global change driver of TMF characteristics: composition, specific and functional diversity, size structure;
(2) to project changes in TMF characteristics with global change, and
(3) to produce decision-making tools for conservation and sustainable management strategies, to adapt to consequences of global change.
Content. The two core alternative hypotheses of CoForChange concern the main factors, and associated drivers, that govern spatial and temporal variation of TMF characteristics in the region, either: (H1) water availability, driven by climate, water table depth and soil properties; or (H2) light availability, driven by anthropogenic disturbance (rather than climate). Those factors filter species depending on their drought tolerance and light requirement. Depending on which hypothesis is true, conservation and sustainable management strategies will not be the same.
To test these hypotheses, and fulfill our objectives, we will organize our work into six scientific workpackages aiming at:
(1) mapping and characterizing tree communities and environmental factors;
(2) mapping soil water availability and its sensitivity to rainfall pattern;
(3) analysing past changes in vegetation, disturbance and environmental changes;
(4) characterising drought tolerance, light requirements and associated functional traits of tree species;
(5) evaluating the ongoing evolution of tree communities and
(6) integrating results to provide diagnosis and decision-making tools to attenuate the effects of global change.
Our project will mobilize, for 4 years, an interdisciplinary team of researchers and forest engineers from 8 european public and private institutions, associated to 5 african public institutions and an international organization. It will gather specialists of remote-sensing, populations and communities ecology, functional ecology, hydrology/climatology, pedology, paleoecology, anthropology and modelling. We will use existing data, in particular extensive pools of satellite imagery and a unique database on forest inventories, acquire new paleoecological data on sediment cores and soil profiles, analyse new archaeological sites and implement controlled drought and light experiments on the main tree species of the Congo Basin region.
Expected impact and dissemination of results.
CoForChange will provide operational tools –
(i) thematic maps identifying the oldest, less resilient, faster-developing or more biodiverse communities;
(ii) maps outlining the possible impacts of various scenarios of climate and anthropogenic change on future tree species distributions and thus TMFs characteristics;
(iii) databases on important species environmental requirements, and
(iv) identification of endangered species or groups of species.
Those tools will address decision-makers needs to reason, on a sound basis, conservation strategies and sustainable management of forests – comprising timber logging rules - and to adapt their related territories and forest management policies. All along the project, results will be disseminated through scientific articles, a dedicated website (www.coforchange.eu), a half-yearly newsletter, a series of policy brieves and management guidelines, and existing teaching modules in several schools or universities. A regional workshop will be organised in the Congo basin region to disseminate results to regional stakeholders, and an international workshop will be held at the end of the project to disseminate results to the scientific community.
Main anticipated users.
We anticipate four categories of users.
(1) Private sector, including logging and consulting companies. Logging companies will get a better understanding of the characteristics and functioning of the stands they log and will have objective elements to discuss
(i) with the forest administration, to implement national forest management norms and standards, including revising their existing management plans;
(ii) with the environmental NGOs when discussing about their possible “destroying activities” in the forests of the region;
(iii) with certification auditors on the process of designing and sustaining eco-certificates (FSC, PAFC…). The 11 companies that got engaged in the project are explicitly waiting for this kind of return. Consulting companies will rely on new results and data to provide advice to logging companies to implement national management rules, and facilitate the up-levellling of the industry's processes to achieve certification.
(2) Public institutions, including national forest and environment administrations, and regional bodies, such as COMIFAC1 or RAPAC, aiming at a sound management of the forests in the region. National administrations will get tools to better plan their logging and conservation strategies both at the country scale and at the scale of the concession when revising the management plans; COMIFAC and RAPAC will get sound information to refine their own strategies, and to support and possibly to orientate national policies.
(3) Conservation NGOs, structures like IUCN or CITES (which define species status) and certification institutions. They will get objective data and information to promote the necessity of
(i) modifying logging rules for particularly endangered species or inscribing them on lists regulating their trade;
(ii) defining conservation areas in particular locations, which the project will contribute to identify.
(4) Multi and bi-lateral cooperation partners of the Congo Basin forest, with the European commission as the major contributor and first beneficiary: the tools provided by CoForChange will benefit to international donors in providing strategic guidance on the most appropriate sectors where to focus the support to Congo Basin forests, balancing production and conservation, with a specific focus on the impact of their grants and loans on both mitigation and adaptation of forest management related to global change.
Involving users and stakeholders.
Two of the European partners of CoForChange work on a day to day basis with forest managers, administrations and local organisations (communities and local NGOs) in the region. Key managers and decision-makers will be further involved through synergies with ongoing projects such as FORAF (developing an observatory for African forests – OFAC, project headed by the coordinating partner) or the European supported AFLE/FLEGT initiative to provide them with better insight, data and knowledge on the sustainability of logging in the region. The five African partners of the region will be in charge of further communicating about the project in their sphere of influence.
One of the partners of CoForChange is a consulting company and will be in charge of the permanent linking with the forest industrials. A representative of the involved logging companies (the head of ATIBT2) is part of the Steering Committee of the project, and a permanent e-mail link is kept with the management teams of the companies.
Regular information will be sent to all the other stakeholders through the direct diffusion of the newsletter of the project, and policy brieves. At the beginning of the fourth year of the project, a workshop specifically dedicated to national users and stakeholders of the region will be held in Cameroon, in order to disseminate the state of knowledge, involve them in the design of the final decision-making tools and in the writing of management guidelines. During the international workshop that will take place at the end of the project, a particular session will be dedicated to EC decision-makers, coming from national delegations operating in the Congo basin region, and from the different Commission Directions involved, including DG-DEV and AidCo.
Designing the project outputs to maximise appropriate use.
We intend to produce handable thematic maps that will be available through the CoForChange and OFAC/FORAF websites, and possibly printed on paper. To maximise their use, the final themes of the maps will be discussed and decided with the users and stakeholders during the regional workshop. The data bases and lists of endangered species will be made available through the same websites. Policy brieves and management guidelines, making use of this information, will be printed and actively disseminated to the users and stakeholders. The project outputs will be used in forest schools and universities of the region, where several of us are highly involved in teaching the future staff of the forest and environment administrations.
Long-term impact/legacy of our research.
Among the expected impacts, we can point:
(i) the improvement of existing conservation areas networks at the regional and national levels, with the introduction of innovative protection criteria such as tree communities resilience;
(ii) the inclusion, in national management guidelines, of geographical and technical logging rules adapted to the ecology of species with a long term effect on the ecological integrity of the logged forests, and their global balance in terms of ecosystem services;
(iii) the improvement of certification criterias and indicators, with the definition of more precise ecological requirements in the main certification systems, like FSC and PAFC;
(iv) the acknowledgement by all partners, including environmental NGOs, that logging practices do not systematically lead to forest destruction and can benefit to the african populations;
(v) a contribution to more scientifically based and constructive debates on sustainable forest management between logging companies and NGOs.
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