TLs work

Toni Lyn's job here in DRC mostly entails connecting up different experts and interested parties from different European countries (German aid agency, Canadian embassy, EU), the World Bank, foreign NGOs (WWF, WCS, CI), US AID (Agency for International Development), local NGOs, etc., with the Ministry of the Environment in DRC, and especially the Department of Forestry, to help them move forward and together on land use planning and forest inventory. This matters because the DRC has the 2nd most extensive rainforest in the world and, importantly, most of it is still here. Moreover, the people in the DRC are incredibly poor (ranked the poorest according to at least one source), despite the DRC being one of the most resource rich countries in the world. And there is a lot of money that is available to the DRC for development, biodiversity conservation, and carbon accounting (i.e., calculating how much carbon can be sucked up by the forests here to slow climate change), it just doesn't always get used as efficiently as possible (to say the least). So my job is to support the DRC Ministry of Environment, and the Forestry Department in particular, as they ramp up to make decisions and fund these processes. Since the DRC is now recovering from >10 years of civil war and strife (apparently when her "boss" from US AID came here to Kinshasa in 2003 there was "no one" here, as he put it - no American agencies but also all the DRC government buildings were empty), they have a lot of need for rebuilding the basic processes and relationships that will allow them to efficiently, effectively, and with as little waste (let's say it they way) as possible to move forward on this zoning and inventory.


Oh, and if you're wondering why the US Forest Service would be interested in supporting anything like this, there are many reasons, including that we have a sustainability and conservation mandate, but you can also think of it as we are preventing overcutting in other countries so the US logging markets aren't undercut in terms of pricing. In other words, if the forests of South America and southeast Asia and Central Africa are chopped down and exported cheaply using bad social and environmental practices, the U.S. (which uses good social and environmental practices) won't be able to sell their wood.