DRC's Mai-Ndombe Carbon Programme: A Seven-Year Wait, and a Programme Its Own Evaluators Doubt

The Mai-Ndombe Emission Reductions Programme, covering a Congo Basin province the size of England, became the first project worldwide selected into the World Bank's FCPF Carbon Fund portfolio, in December 2016, aiming to pay DRC for satellite-verified cuts in deforestation and degradation.

Monitoring runs through the Observatoire Satellital des Forêts d'Afrique Centrale (OSFAC), the region's satellite forest-monitoring observatory, feeding DRC's national MRV system alongside ground forest inventories.

The Emission Reductions Payment Agreement was signed in September 2018 but took until July 2022 to enter into force; DRC received its first-ever payment only in June 2025 - $19.48 million for 3.89 million tonnes of verified CO2 reductions in the 2019-2020 period, according to World Bank reporting.

Independent field research on the Mai-Ndombe programme, published by Rainforest Foundation UK and covered by Mongabay, found that many of its constituent REDD+ projects had not obtained free, prior and informed consent from local communities, delivered few of their promised benefits, and in some cases appeared to have had little effect on deforestation - or even coincided with continued forest loss. The programme illustrates a broader tension in results-based forest finance: a technically credible satellite-carbon accounting result can coexist with weak on-the-ground legitimacy.

Read the full analysis: https://www.rainforestfoundationuk.org/research-into-mai-ndombe-redd-programme-shows-how-forest-carbon-offsets-fail-to-reduce-deforestation-and-come-at-a-human-cost/