CBCS – Congo Basin Conservation Society

• Land rights and environmental justice: defending the land access rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities living around protected areas and in high-biodiversity ecological corridors; monitoring compliance with environmental and human rights law at strategic mining sites for a just transition.

• Advocacy and habitat protection: campaigning against decisions that destroy biodiversity habitats (major infrastructure projects, mining in protected areas, illegal wildlife trafficking of great apes and precious timber, and threats to forests, wetlands and peatlands).

• Agroecology and food sovereignty: advocating for agroecology in public policy, integrating climate resilience and biodiversity conservation in DRC, and promoting farmer seed systems and territorial markets.

• Community forestry: empowering Indigenous peoples and local communities to secure rights over their ancestral lands and forests, restore degraded landscapes and conserve biodiversity through community-based, nature-based approaches.

• Species protection through an anti-ecocide campaign: a community strategy to protect hippopotamuses in the Ruzizi river and Lake Tanganyika (a Burundi border area), and combating wildlife and plant crime and trafficking of rare, endemic species.

• Restoration of degraded ecosystems: promoting community-based restoration using indigenous rare timber species and cacao.

Congo Basin Conservation Society-Network (CBCS-Network) was formally established on 24 December 2016 by environmental actors from the Congo Basin, registered as an apolitical, non-denominational development NGO under DRC law 004/2001. It was founded in response to the region’s mounting environmental crises: habitat conversion from industrial and artisanal mining, forest and watershed degradation, freshwater pollution and accelerating deforestation, compounded by climate change effects (floods, disrupted farming calendars, epidemics, dwindling rivers, livestock losses). Recognising that the Congo Basin’s rainforests are one of the world’s most important biodiversity centres, home to roughly 20% of all known plant and animal species, and that meaningful conservation requires genuinely involving local communities across the basin’s shared countries (DRC, Gabon, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Congo, Central African Republic), CBCS-Network was created to build a new generation of conservation experts delivering market-based, locally-rooted solutions and a new ecosystem stewardship ethic for the Congo Basin.