The Democratic Republic of Congo has passed legislation to protect a forest area the size of France — 540,000 square kilometers — making it the largest protected tropical forest reserve on Earth. At the heart of the plan is the Kivu-Kinshasa Green Corridor, a network of economic hubs powered by renewable energy that aims to link conservation with real livelihoods for millions of people across one of the planet’s most ecologically vital regions.
At a glance
- Congo Basin protection: New DRC legislation covers 540,000 km² total, including 108,000 km² of primary forest — roughly the size of Iceland — now in the process of formal protection through community-integrated conservation partnerships.
- Carbon sequestration: The Congo Basin currently absorbs 1.5 billion tonnes of CO₂ annually and its peat swamps store 29 billion tonnes of carbon, equivalent to about three years of total global greenhouse gas emissions.
- Green jobs target: The Kivu-Kinshasa Green Corridor aims to create 500,000 new jobs and transfer one million tonnes of food annually from the Kivus to Kinshasa, the largest city in Africa.
Why the Congo Basin matters so much
The Amazon gets most of the headlines, but the Congo Basin is the larger story right now. In 2021 C.E., the Amazon crossed a grim threshold — warming and deforestation had turned it from a carbon sink into a net emitter. The Congo Basin, by contrast, is still functioning. It covers roughly 3.7 million square kilometers across six countries and contains 10,000 unique species, a third of which exist nowhere else on Earth.
About 60 million people depend on the forest for food, energy, and income. Sixty percent of the basin lies within the DRC. That concentration of intact tropical forest, functioning carbon storage, and human dependence makes the DRC one of the most consequential places on the planet for climate stability.
Yet the basin faces serious pressure. Monocrop agriculture, industrial meat farming, illegal charcoal trafficking, and decades of armed conflict have all taken a toll — especially in eastern DRC, where nearly 90% of the population lives below the extreme poverty line. The connection between poverty and deforestation is not incidental; it is structural. The new plan tries to address both at once.
The Virunga model, scaled up
The Kivu-Kinshasa Green Corridor builds on a model already tested inside Virunga National Park, Africa’s oldest national park and a UNESCO World Heritage site. The Virunga Alliance — a partnership between government agencies, civil society, and private investors — has spent years converting the park’s hydropower potential into clean electricity and building sustainable agriculture in the communities around it.
The results are concrete. The Alliance has created over 21,000 jobs in five years. Crucially, 11% of those jobs are now held by young men and women who left armed militias. That is not a footnote — it is the logic of the whole approach: give people a better economic option, and the armed groups that profit from illegal resource extraction lose their labor pool.
The new legislation, passed by the DRC parliament in January 2025 C.E., extends that logic across a vastly larger area. The corridor will be built around a network of renewable energy hubs — drawing on the enormous hydropower potential of the Congo River — linked by sustainable agricultural production and logistics infrastructure that connects the resource-rich east to the population center of Kinshasa in the west.
International partners and what they’re committing
The initiative launched publicly at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2025 C.E., formalized through the 1t.org Virunga-Kinshasa Green Corridor pledge. The European Union announced €42 million in additional grant funding at the launch. Other backers include Grameen Bank, the Schmidt Family Foundation, and the WEF’s own 1t.org initiative.
The DRC government is calling for further partners in renewable energy development, sustainable agriculture, high-integrity carbon credits, and conservation financing. The structure is explicitly a public-private model — the government sets the framework and provides the land and legal backing; partners bring capital and technical capacity.
Gim Huay Neo, Managing Director of the World Economic Forum, called it “a bold and ambitious endeavour to protect and restore one of the Earth’s last lungs,” and urged partners to support what she described as a joint collaboration between the DRC government, business, and civil society.
An honest look at the challenges ahead
The scale of the ambition is matched by the scale of the obstacles. Eastern DRC remains an active conflict zone — over 211 Virunga park rangers have been killed protecting the park, and more than half of Virunga itself is currently under rebel control. Translating a framework that works within a single national park into a functioning green economy across an area the size of France will require sustained political will, security conditions that don’t yet fully exist, and international funding that holds over years rather than news cycles.
There are also questions about community consent and benefit-sharing at this scale. The plan is built on principles of local consent and economic incentives, but ensuring that 60 million forest-dependent people genuinely shape — rather than simply receive — this development model will be the real test of its integrity over time.
What is already clear is that the DRC has produced something rare: a conservation plan that takes poverty seriously, a jobs plan that takes ecology seriously, and a peace-building strategy that takes both seriously at once. Whether the international community meets it with equal seriousness is the open question.
Read more
For more on this story, see: World Economic Forum
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Ghana creates a new marine protected area at Cape Three Points
- Indigenous land rights: 160 million hectares recognized ahead of COP30
- The Good News for Humankind archive on forest conservation
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