Overview

The DRC occupies a central place in global forest politics. It contains the world’s second largest tropical forest, the largest carbon sink, and one of the most significant REDD+ landscapes in the world. Through its long participation in REDD+, the role of the voluntary carbon market in climate finance, and its political effort to market itself as a climate “solutions country,” the DRC has become one of the largest carbon credit exporters on the continent. Yet this prominence sits beside a stark contradiction: deforestation in the DRC remains the highest in the Congo Basin, and its carbon market is still governed by a fragmented regulatory patchwork rather than a comprehensive carbon law.^[1]

Instead of a single, unified framework, the DRC relies on a mix of land law, forest law, ministerial orders, environmental procedures, REDD+ instruments, and newer carbon-market reforms. This structure leaves major loopholes and overlapping mandates, while many projects are shaped by concession holders, especially logging companies, rather than by Indigenous Peoples, local communities, or customary tenure holders. For communities, this means the legal terrain is both important and difficult: no project should begin operations without approval from the relevant authorities, compliance with land and forest law, environmental procedures, and adherence to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent requirements.^[1]

Key Takeaways

Legal and Institutional Framework

Beyond these laws, the DRC adopted a National REDD+ Strategy in 2012, created FONAREDD, and released a REDD+ Investment Plan in 2015. Many of those ambitions, however, have been implemented only partially, with decentralization, coordination problems, and resource constraints limiting follow-through.^[2][4]

ARMCA and the Push to Formalize the Market

In 2023, the DRC created the basis for a Carbon Market Regulatory Authority, ARMCA. Ordinance-law no. 23/007 incorporated carbon markets into Congolese environmental law and helped establish the legal scaffolding for the DRC’s Nationally Determined Contribution framework. Decree No. 23/22 of June 2023 then identified ARMCA’s mandates, including organization of the DRC’s carbon market, stewardship of the national carbon registry, implementation of the carbon tax, development of carbon market policy, ensuring benefits to Indigenous Peoples and local communities, and arbitration of carbon-project claims and appeals.^[1]

On paper, ARMCA looks like an effort to streamline the country’s carbon market. In practice, the picture is more complicated. The overview you shared notes unclear and overlapping mandates across ARMCA, the Ministries of Finance and Planning, and other sectoral ministries. It also notes that ARMCA is not yet operational, which means the promised centralization and standardization of carbon governance is still incomplete.^[3][5]

The document also emphasizes that lack of transparency remains central. Key 2023 reforms were reportedly rushed through without due diligence or participation by Indigenous Peoples or local communities, and FPIC was absent from the environmental updates made by Ordinance Law no. 23/007. So while carbon-market proponents often describe the problem as one of insufficient operational guidance, the deeper issue is that institutional buildout is occurring alongside exclusion from decision-making.^[5]

Carbon Rights

Carbon rights are one of the most consequential weaknesses in the DRC’s current framework. Under Ministerial Order 047, the state controls rights to all carbon in the DRC and transfers those rights to project proponents upon project approval. In other words, carbon rights are not treated like ordinary forest product rights; they are effectively constituted through state-project contracts rather than flowing clearly from land tenure or forest use rights.^[1][6]

The Mai Ndombe Emission Reduction Program discussions highlighted the dangers of this approach. The source material notes that the lack of a clear carbon-rights regime may collide with legitimate claims already held by concession holders or local communities with forest use rights. Yet instead of resolving the issue in favor of tenure-based rights, the practical outcome has often been to privilege the government and concession-linked project holders. As the Environmental Investigation Agency argued in its review of the Mai Ndombe ERPD, this setup appears to establish that concession holders can commercialize emissions reductions while other land users lack an equivalent legal basis for claims to carbon revenue.^[6]

This ambiguity has immediate implications for communities. If carbon rights do not clearly flow from legitimate tenure and forest use rights, then communities risk being relegated to the margins of projects that reshape land access and forest use in their territories. The profile recommends that communities engaged in project implementation agreement negotiations demand to see the state-investor agreement on carbon rights and seek its inclusion as an annex to any implementation agreement. SDSG’s stated position, echoed in the source material, is that carbon rights should flow from legitimate tenure rights, even where those rights are not formally registered.^[8]

Benefit Sharing

Benefit sharing appears in several relevant DRC instruments, but the problem is less total absence than weak structure and weak enforcement. The law on the rights of Indigenous Pygmy Peoples recognizes a right to benefit from products derived from land used by third parties. Ministerial Order 011/27 on forest concessions makes failure to deliver benefits promised to local communities grounds for concession termination. And Ministerial Order 047 requires project proponents to negotiate a benefit-sharing agreement with stakeholders.^[1]

The central weakness is that there are no strong guardrails for what benefit sharing must look like in practice. Interministerial Order 006/120 sets minimum quotas from carbon credit sales for levels of government and environmental funds, but it does not establish a clear minimum share for Indigenous Peoples or local communities. Funds for communities are instead treated as part of the contractual charges deducted from revenue before other allocations are made. This means communities are vulnerable to project-by-project arrangements where they have no claim to carbon rights and may receive, at best, one-off investments counted as project operating costs rather than durable revenue streams.^[1]

The EIA’s review of Mai Ndombe raised the same concern directly: the legal framework privileges the government and project holders who contract with government to commercialize carbon, while others lack a clear legal route to carbon revenue except through broader judicial claims. The likely result is that the main beneficiaries are the state and concession holders, while local communities receive co-benefits that may be limited, delayed, and unsustainable.^[6]

Carbon and Land Governance in the DRC

Land governance is the deeper structure underlying all of these problems. As in many African countries, the DRC’s current land tenure situation is shaped by colonial history. Despite partial reforms, the state remains in control of all land and resources, while individual and community rights derive from state-sanctioned concessions or from customary practices whose legal force is often ambiguous. Since the 1973 property law formalized this model, customary tenure has remained unstable in legal terms.^[1]

The 2002 Forest Law created the basis for community-owned and community-managed forests, but the framework was only elaborated later through rules on community forest concessions. Even then, implementation has been inconsistent, and abuses by customary leaders, corruption, and lack of clear implementation guidelines have weakened otherwise significant legal protections. The source you shared emphasizes that such abuses are pervasive and tied to inadequate anti-corruption regulation and weak institutional follow-through.^[2][5]

Logging and mining dominate land-use trends and are major drivers of deforestation and tenure-rights violations. This matters enormously for carbon markets because many of the same actors driving forest pressure are also treated as partners in emissions-reduction efforts. RFUK’s recent review identified extensive participation by logging companies in the DRC’s carbon market, often through efforts to convert logging concessions into conservation concessions. The legal pathway for that conversion remains unclear, and the lack of transparency has enabled cases where logging concessions were converted after termination or when commercial timber operations became unviable. That creates serious risks of elite capture and reputational harm for the carbon market as a whole.^[5]

The source explicitly advises that communities negotiating with a project proponent scrutinize the concession underlying the project and treat a valid conservation concession as a condition precedent before even entering into an implementation agreement. The newer 2025 land-use planning law may improve community participation and dispute handling, but its relationship to community forestry, Indigenous rights law, and older land reform remains unresolved. In other words, reform is moving, but harmonization is not yet there.^[5]

Conclusion

The DRC’s forests matter enormously for climate politics, biodiversity, and livelihoods, and transmitting finance to customary tenure holders for forest stewardship is genuinely important. But the overview you shared makes clear that the DRC’s current carbon market landscape is defined by opacity, fragmented governance, weakly protected community claims, and strong patterns of capture by state actors and concession-linked elites. These are problems found across carbon markets more broadly, but they are especially pronounced in the Congo Basin.^[1][5]

The DRC does have some strong laws and provisions related to forest management, FPIC, Indigenous rights, community forests, and land-use planning. The problem is that implementation gaps, corruption, weak coordination, and lack of political will often prevent those provisions from becoming real safeguards in practice. This means that communities and their supporters cannot rely on the rhetoric of climate solutions or conservation alone. They need to test every project against concession status, approval pathways, FPIC procedures, land and forest rights, and the concrete structure of benefits and obligations in writing.^[1]