The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) officially launched a new project supported by the Initiative for Climate Action Transparency (ICAT), aiming to strengthen the national climate change transparency frameworks. Held in Kinshasa on June 3, the project’s inception workshop brought together key national stakeholders to kick off the project’s implementation. 

“This project represents an exceptional opportunity for the DRC,” stated Benjamin Toirambe Bamoninga, Secretary General of the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development at the workshop’s opening session. “Transparency is more than a formal requirement—it is a strategic lever for guiding climate action and unlocking finance.”

Photo courtesy of the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development.

DRC has been a member of ICAT’s regional hub in Central Africa, hosted by the Economic Commission for Central African States, since 2021. Supported by the hub, DRC developed in 2023, a national Climate Transparency Action Plan. The plan outlined concrete steps to advance DRC’s national transparency frameworks. These included developing a tool to track implementation of the Nationally Determined Contributions, clarifying institutional responsibilities, and enhancing capacity for regular and accurate reporting to the international community.

In line  with these national priorities, the ICAT project in DRC is structured around the following core objectives: 

• Establish a measurement, reporting, and verification framework to improve DRC’s greenhouse gas inventory and enable the tracking of mitigation actions.
• Strengthen capacity and national systems for monitoring progress on the country’s NDCs, particularly in the waste, energy, and agriculture sectors, including through the use of the GACMO tool.
• Map key greenhouse gas mitigation policies and actions to support evidence-based climate planning and reporting.
• Lay the groundwork for a centralized digital platform to manage and streamline climate data collection and reporting efforts.

In her closing remarks, Ève Bazaiba Masudi, Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development, highlighted that transparency must be underpinned by a comprehensive, regularly updated national database of climate actions and urged DRC’s stakeholders to embrace their roles. “This system will only be effective through the active engagement of all relevant ministries and stakeholders,” she said, noting that climate action is a shared responsibility.

Photo courtesy of the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development.

A detailed mapping of institutional roles and data needs will be the first activity to be undertaken under the project, a crucial starting point to strengthen ownership of the NDC and enhance confidence in national policies.

The DRC’s Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development is leading the project implementation, with support from technical experts from ICAT’s implementing partners, Citepa and the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute. 

Photo courtesy of the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development.