WWF is working closely with UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, to prevent encroachment into the World Heritage-listed Virunga National Park by displaced people after several weeks of civil unrest in the area, and to help them meet the huge demand in fuelwood.

About 35,000 people have fled the heavily armed conflict near Sake in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo over the past week, according to the UN.

People fleeing the fighting in Sake, west of Goma, the largest town in the region, have spontaneously set up three camps for internally displaced people in Mugunga, a small town next to Virunga National Park. However, one of them – the Lac Vert Camp – is partly located within the park.

“With so many internally displaced people near Goma looking for food, shelter and fuelwood, we are facing a very difficult situation,” said Marc Languy of WWF’s Eastern Africa Regional Programme Office.

"One of the challenges is to avert a fuelwood crisis that would put the park’s forest under pressure while ensuring the displaced people have all the necessary commodities they need.”

WWF is working closely with UNHCR and ICCN (Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature) to find solutions to the problem, under a programme funded by the European Union.

While collection of wood within the park is being regulated to meet the immediate demand, several alternatives have already been identified, such as sourcing of wood from nearby plantations. Most of them are located among the 10 million trees WWF has planted in the past 20 years around Virunga National Park.

“With an average of 12kg of wood per family per day, we are looking at about 50 tonnes of wood to be collected every day; it is a real challenge for both humanitarian and conservation NGOs,” explained Languy.

During meetings with UNHCR, WWF also provided maps showing the park’s boundaries so that the most suitable areas for settlements can be identified.

While recent threats to mountain gorillas — nine of them have been killed in the past few months — seem to be coming slowly under control, habitat destruction, and in particular deforestation, remains the most important concern, as it has far-reaching and long-lasting effects on the park’s biodiversity.

“We don’t want history to repeat itself, when in 1994-1995, in the face of another humanitarian disaster, hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing Rwanda invaded Virunga National Park and destroyed the forest. It still has not recovered,” added Languy.

UNHCR is encouraging the displaced people to move from the Lac Vert Camp to a new camp that could accommodate up to 5,000 families. This is an encouraging sign that will help reduce the damage to the park, according to WWF.

However, WWF is concerned that some other humanitarian NGOs are discouraging people to move from the problematic camp to the new one set up by UNHCR. WWF urges these NGOs to respect national and international law and not to build any infrastructure within the protected area.

END NOTES:
• The three IDP camps in the Mugunga area are Mugunga 1, Mugunga 2 and Lac Vert. UNHCR set up a new camp, Bulengo, which could accommodate people from the Lac Vert Camp.

• Virunga National Park is situated in eastern DRC along the borders with Rwanda and Uganda, stretching over 300km between Lake Kivu and Lake Albert. Created in 1925, it is the oldest national park in Africa and also the most biodiverse, with over 700 species of bird and 200 species of mammals. Over 60,000 people still live illegally inside the protected area. Except for mountain gorillas, which have shown an increase in population in the last 20 years due to important conservation efforts, most wildlife in the park have heavily suffered from poaching. The population of hippopotamus, for example, has dropped from 29,000 in the mid-1970s to fewer than 1,000 today.

• In times of peace, Virunga National Park brings over US$3 million annually from tourism revenues, mostly from visits to mountain gorillas. The park is also an important source of protein for local communities, with over 20,000 fishermen providing up to 15,000 tons of fish each year.

• WWF and ICCN (Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature) have been working together with local communities around Virunga National Park since 1987 through the PEVi (Programme Environnemental autour des Virunga) programme. The programme, partly funded by the European Union, aims to raise awareness on conservation among local communities, based on rural development activities such as agroforestry and buffer zone management. It is also actively working in demarcation and monitoring of the boundaries of the national park and in the peaceful removal of illegal settlers in many areas.