By Mary Childs WASHINGTON, June 13 (Reuters) - A significant number of logging concessions issued by previous governments in the Democratic Republic of Congo, home to the world's second-largest tropical forest after the Amazon, could be scrapped under a World Bank-sponsored legal review. "It's very hard to predict, but given the very clear criteria, it is reasonable to expect that a significant amount of the concessions will be canceled," Guiseppe Topa, a forest specialist for Africa at the World Bank, said in an interview with Reuters. The independent review being conducted by the World Resources Institute is considering 156 titles, most of them issued during Congo's 1998-2003 civil war and a three-year transition period led by an interim power-sharing government. The Congo Basin forest, which spans six countries including the DRC, hosts the world's largest populations of lowland gorillas, chimpanzees and forest elephants. In addition, it provides a direct global benefit by absorbing atmospheric carbon. Cutting and burning tropical forests contributes 20 percent of the overall carbon emissions that are accelerating climate change. Logging, often illegal or unregulated, and clearing of land for agriculture are eating away at the intact ecosystems of the Congo Basin forest, which are being degraded at the rate of 2 million acres every year. Despite a five-year moratorium on new logging titles, environmental group Greenpeace estimates 107 new logging titles were awarded in the DRC at low prices. Greenpeace estimates that the 156 contracts under review covers 21 million hectares (51.87 million acres) of forests, which in total span across 172 million hectares (424.84 million acres). It said that by 2002, even though production was brought to its knees by the war, about 43.5 million hectares of forest -- an area larger than California -- were controlled by the logging industry and overlapped with villages, agricultural land and biodiversity hotspots. As Congo's new President Joseph Kabila, the country's first democratically elected leader in over 40 years, focuses on rebuilding the central African country, Greenpeace said it was worried many of the illegal logging contracts would remain. But Topa said there was too much at stake for Congo not to correct the problems of the past. "The legal review is not only key to reestablishing minimum governability conditions for the forest sector," Topa said. "It is also a test for DRC's capacity to improve the country's governance and domestic and international credibility." The World Bank is by far the country's largest donor and has approved $4 billion in loans, credits and grants for the Congo between 2001 and 2006. Susanne Breitkopf, a Greenpeace policy advisor, said the group was concerned that the criteria for evaluating the titles were insufficient, and that some, if not all, of the titles allocated since the moratorium will be authorized."They must be canceled," she told Reuters. The organization has urged the World Bank to make its loans to Congo conditional on commitments by the government to tackle widespread corruption in the timber industry and ensuring proper land use and conservation planning. The moratorium on new logging titles could be lifted once the legal review is completed, as soon as October or November, and when a three-year concession allocation plan is in place. "(The World Bank's) own credibility is at stake," said Filip Verbelen of Greenpeace Belgium. "If this doesn't work out well, it once again shows that the World Bank is really not capable of implementing sound reforms in these sectors." Breitkopf said she worried the World Bank would not follow through to ensure adequate monitoring of Congo's forests and that local communities are protected. "The bank has started to speak the right language," she said, "but it needs to stop turning a blind eye to the realities on the ground, especially in a country like the DRC. Otherwise, the Congo forest will soon be under the chain saw."
