Funds Sought for Congolese Parks, Victims of War

PARIS, France, September 16, 2004 (ENS) - UNESCO World Heritage sites devastated by armed conflicts raging across the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are in urgent need of funding for their protection, says the United Nations Foundation.

The foundation is supporting UNESCO's efforts to protect biodiversity in five Congolese parks that shelter the last remnants of endangered gorillas, chimpanzees, rhinos and okapis.

Headquartered in Washington, DC, the UN Foundation is a charitable organization created in 1998 with CNN founder and philanthropist Ted Turner's $1 billion gift to support United Nations causes.

One of some 30 white rhinoceros that still exist. These rare animals are larger than their more numerous cousins, the black rhinos. >(Photo courtesy UNESCO)

The event, an international donors' conference in Paris, aims to raise at least $5 million to conserve this environmentally rich area through a program, the first of its kind, called the "Biodiversity Conservation in Regions of Armed Conflict: Conserving World Heritage Sites in the DRC."

At the conference, the UN Foundation will pledge an additional $1.2 million to the conservation program in core and matching funds, bringing the total funds awarded to this program by the UN Foundation to more than $4.2 million.

The five endangered Congolese World Heritage Sites - the National Parks of Virunga, Garamba, Kahuzi-Biega and Salonga, and the Okapi Wildlife Reserve - abound in endangered species such as bonobo chimpanzees, wild okapis, most of the surviving mountain gorillas, and the last surviving northern white rhinoceros.

The Okapi Wildlife Reserve occupies about one-fifth of the Ituri forest, part of the Zaire river basin. The reserve contains about 5,000 of the estimated 30,000 okapi surviving in the wild. (Photo courtesy UNESCO)

One of the program's key elements was ensuring that the park guards would be able to do their protective work in a time of turmoil.

"Conserving biodiversity and habitat is one of the major objectives of the UN Foundation. UNESCO's World Heritage Convention has provided the diplomatic umbrella necessary to protect the five World Heritage parks of the Congo, which are teeming with the most extraordinary wildlife in Africa," said Timothy Wirth, the former U.S. senator and congressman from Colorado who serves now as president of the UN Foundation.

"More than ever, it is vital to continue to preserve these sites, which are part of the exceptional oxygen providing Congo Basin, second only to the Amazonian forest," Wirth said. "We encourage other donors, institutions and corporations worldwide to join us in this project."

A workshop took place Wednesday to foster partnerships among the government of the DRC, the private sector, the United Nations' Great Ape Survival Project (GRASP), nongovernmental organizations and international financial institutions such as the World Bank, to mobilize further support to preserve biodiversity in the country.

Gorillas huddle together in the DRC's Virunga National Park (Photo courtesy UNESCO)

Funding can produce conservation results even in areas affected by armed conflict. On August 30, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) announced that the governments of Rwanda and the DRC have put an end to the illegal clearing of forests in the Virunga National Park for human settlement.

UNEP contributed US$50,000 towards the construction of a perimeter wall in the Mikeno sub sector of the park, which is being implemented by GRASP partner organizations, the International Gorilla Conservation Project and WWF together with the Frankfurt Zoological Society the European Commission and the Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature.

The illegal invasion of the park by settlers from Rwanda in April had threatened the integrity of the park as a World Heritage Site and home to the remaining population of the endangered mountain gorilla.

Fifteen square kilometers of the 250 square kilometers of the Mikeno sub sector of the park had been cleared by the time pressure on the local authorities to step in and stop the forest clearing had an effect.

In an effort to avoid a repetition of such events, the conservation organizations are constructing a dry stone wall to clearly demarcate the park boundary from the human settlement areas.