- More than a year ago, Democratic Republic of Congo President Félix Tshisekedi announced the Green Corridor, a conservation initiative that may stretch across the country, create 500,000 jobs, conserve over 540,000 km2 (208,500 mi2) of land, and improve infrastructure along the Congo River.
- According to people familiar with early discussions, the concept grew in part from Virunga National Park’s efforts to tackle an illegal war economy in North Kivu province and to try delivering alternative benefits to surrounding communities, including energy, agriculture and livelihoods.
- With uncertainty lingering over the conflict in eastern Congo, the government is now seeking to adapt elements of the Virunga conservation-and-development approach to a much larger landscape.
- While praised by some, observers, conservation groups and advocacy organizations caution that significant questions remain, particularly around the management of existing concessions — including agriculture, logging, oil and hydrocarbon blocks — as well as the protection of communities’ rights.
SALONGA NATIONAL PARK, Democratic Republic of Congo — A year and a half ago, the President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Félix Tshisekedi, went to the Davos World Economic Forum and announced an ambitious project: the Kivu-Kinshasa Green Corridor.
This corridor is considered the largest conservation and development initiative ever proposed in Africa. The plan, according to sources within DRC’s government, aims to stretch from the Kivus in eastern DRC to Kinshasa in the west, create 500,000 jobs, conserve over 540,000 km2 (208,500 mi2) of land (roughly the size of France), and improve infrastructure along the Congo River.
At the time of the announcement, what was less clear was how the idea had been influenced by the experiences of conservation efforts unfolding hundreds of kilometers away in the Virunga National Park. The Congolese Institute for Nature Conservation (ICCN in French), institution responsible for managing protected areas in the DRC, delegated management support of the corridor to the NGO Virunga Foundation.
One of the people who participated in the initial discussions around the initiative is Emmanuel de Merode, the director of the Virunga National Park. De Merode has been managing Virunga since 2008. In a recent interview with Mongabay in the Salonga National Park, he said the green corridor did not emerge from conservation thinking alone. It grew out of years of trying to answer a harder question in eastern Congo: Hhow do you protect a park when the people living around it are poor, armed groups are profiting from its resources, and law enforcement on its own is not enough?
“The president [Tshisekedi] saw what we had done in Virunga and asked how it could be replicated,” de Merode told Mongabay.
Virunga is often cited inside DRC’s conservation community as a case where a national park has moved beyond simple conservation and tried to build an economy around protection. That economy includes hydropower, cocoa production, ecotourism and other livelihood projects.
It, however, remains controversial among human and Indigenous rights organizations, and critics have raised questions over cost, governance and who benefits. Virunga has also lost more than 200 rangers in the line of duty since 1925, and more recently has seen a surge in poaching in areas affected by M23 rebel group activity. A May 2025 Mongabay report found that tree cover loss in Virunga National Park has surged since conflict reignited in late 2021, with armed groups taxing illegal charcoal and timber from within protected areas.
Despite the challenges, some in the government believe that the park’s experiences in trying to craft conservation projects that included communities in a region marred by conflict and hardship could offer lessons for the corridor.
De Merode said the turning point came after years in which violence around Virunga devastated both people and wildlife. By his account, armed groups had built what he called a “war economy” around the park’s resources, including charcoal, illegal fishing, land grabbing and trafficking. Rangers were dying. Local communities, many of whom were restricted from accessing resources in the park they traditionally relied on, were struggling and some tried to join illegal timber trades. The park had active protection efforts, but at a cost that de Merode came to see as socially and politically unsustainable.
“We had to confront this illegal economy,” he said. “It was no longer enough just to protect the wildlife.”
“Beyond restriction”
One image, de Merode said, captured the dilemma. It showed women pleading with an armed ranger for access to the forest to make charcoal. According to de Merode, the women were simply trying to feed their children and get energy to boil water.
For Virunga’s management, that realization led to a broader strategy: If conservation was to survive, it had to create alternatives including investing in tourism, energy and the agriculture value chain. Over time, the park invested in hydropower energy generation (called Virunga Energies), trained local engineers and built out an electricity system that, according to de Merode, now supplies more electricity to the public in eastern Congo than the national utility.
He said the idea was not just to keep the lights on, but to dry up revenues flowing to armed groups, reduce pressure on forests for charcoal, and create jobs. He added that each megawatt delivered to surrounding communities generated hundreds of jobs, many tied to small businesses.
“That gave us an instrument not just to protect the park, but to build peace in a very real way,” he said.
The model then expanded into agriculture. Cocoa and coffee became part of the strategy not as simple cash crops, but as tools to create legal value chains in places where illicit trade had long flourished. De Merode described efforts to build fermentation centers, support local transformation and move communities away from dependence on illegal extraction. In one example he cited, chocolate production tied to the park had grown from a tiny output a few years ago to an increasingly serious business.
The broader point, he said, was that conservation in Congo could not endure if it remained only about restriction. It had to become a source of economic life.
According to the project page, the corridor would not alter communities’ customary land rights and any activity affecting their lands needs to ensure it obtains their free, prior and informed consent (FPIC).
That, according to de Merode, is what caught the attention of the DRC presidency. He said the Green Corridor was born out of discussions about how to scale up that logic far beyond Virunga. Instead of focusing only on a single park, the idea was to link conservation areas, agriculture, transport and markets along the Congo River and beyond.
At the center of that thinking, he said, was Kinshasa, a city of almost 20 million people that still depends heavily on imported food.
“Food for 20 million people is non-existent and has to be imported from Brazil, from Europe, from South Africa,” de Merode said. “And yet Congo has this opportunity to be food self-sufficient.”
According to him, planners were asked to come up with a model that could deliver one million tons of food from the east to Kinshasa, create half a million jobs, and protect forests at the same time.
On paper, that is the promise of the Green Corridor. In practice, it remains a work in progress.
According to a 2024 Mongabay report, while Virunga’s hydropower projects are often cited as a model for conservation-linked development, access remains limited and affordability remains a concern for many residents. Some locals say electricity from Virunga Energies is more expensive than alternatives, leading many households to continue relying on charcoal. In addition, supply constraints mean demand in Goma far exceeds available electricity, highlighting both the promise and limitations of conservation-driven energy solutions in conflict-affected regions.
A 2019 CIRAD study found that nearly all households in the major cities in North Kivu province depend on wood fuel, while earlier estimates indicated that much of the charcoal consumed in the region originated from within or around Virunga National Park.
“It keeps us awake at night”
The ambition is huge, say many sources, but so are the risks.
Critics have already questioned whether a project of this scale can genuinely include local communities, respect existing land rights and avoid becoming another top-down conservation scheme in a country with a long history of contested land and extractive politics. Others wonder whether the Virunga model, itself expensive, donor-backed and highly specific to eastern Congo, can really be replicated across such a vast geography.
Alfred Ntumba of EnviroNews praised the project but noted that the corridor overlaps with existing mining, agricultural, timber and hydrocarbon concessions, raising concerns about governance and community benefits.
Advocacy groups echoed similar caution. Greenpeace Africa’s Bonaventure Bondo called the initiative a major opportunity but urged inclusive governance, respect for Indigenous rights and a moratorium on destructive extractive activities. Joe Eisen of Rainforest Foundation UK said the corridor’s success will depend on strong governance and meaningful community participation. Some Indigenous leaders also say they have yet to be consulted on the project’s design.
De Merode himself does not present it as easy. He said the Green Corridor would need to be driven not only by conservation, but by infrastructure, security and private investment. He described it as a long-term effort that will require proof of concept before anything larger can be claimed.
“We’re one year into this project [implementation],” he said. “We feel pretty optimistic about it.” Then he paused and added that the scale of it “keeps us awake at night.”
Banner image: Coffee and cocoa production around Virunga National Park are seen by some proponents of the Green Corridor as activities that can help reduce pressure on forest resources. In Salonga National Park, officials are already encouraging cocoa and coffee cultivation as alternative livelihoods for surrounding communities. Image courtesy of Virunga National Park.
DRC: Can the Kivu–Kinshasa Green Corridor turn a war economy into one of hope?
Citation:
Dubiez, E., Gazull, L., Imani, G., & Péroches, A. (2020). Rapport d’étude de la consommation en énergies de production des usagers productifs de la ville de Goma. Montpellier, France: CIRAD-CAFI. Retrieved from: https://agritrop.cirad.fr/600198/
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