DRC’s 52 new oil blocks threaten vast areas of rainforest, peatlands, people, and the planet
“The Worst Place in the World to Drill for Oil”
In May 2025, the Democratic Republic of Congo announced a new licensing round for 52 oil blocks. This is in addition to three previously awarded oil blocks. The new licensing round is even worse than the DRC’s 2022 oil tender, which was cancelled in October 2024 following national and international criticism.
A new report by Earth Insight in collaboration with Rainforest Foundation UK and Congolese partners Notre Terre Sans Pétrole (Our Land Without Oil) and CORAP uses geospatial analysis to amp the proposed new blocks and assess the social and environmental risks posed.
The report exposes the contradictions between DRC’s fossil fuel agenda, and its commitments to biodiversity protection, climate action, and community rights.
The report summarises the findings as follows:
Oil blocks overlap with 8.3 million hectares of protected areas (23%), 8.6 million hectares of Key Biodiversity Areas (23%), and 66.8 million hectares of intact tropical forests (64%).
72% of the newly established Kivu-Kinshasa Green Corridor, a flagship conservation initiative announced in early 2025, is now overlapped by oil blocks, jeopardizing its ecological integrity and undermining its credibility as a sustainable development and climate solution.
The Cuvette Centrale, the world’s largest tropical peatland complex and a crucial carbon sink storing an estimated 30 gigatons of carbon, is at serious risk of degradation, with the majority of the DRC’s peatland area now included in newly designated oil blocks.
An estimated 39 million people live within the new oil blocks, which overlap with ~37,000 or 49% of the DRC’s settlements.
63% of community forests are overlapped by oil blocks, which represent critical ecosystems for the livelihoods, cultures and survival of many Indigenous peoples and local communities.
The report calls on the DRC government to cancel the most recent licensing round. Instead it should invest in “alternative development models that respect Indigenous and community rights, sustain local livelihoods, and safeguard biodiversity and the global climate”.
Back in 2022, Simon Lewis, professor of global change science at University College London and the University of Leeds, described the rainforests of DRC as “the Worst Place in the World to Drill for Oil”, in an article in the New York Times.
DRC’s rainforests hold vast amounts of carbon and are important wildlife habitats to species such as endangered lowland gorillas and bonobo.
Lewis led the team that first mapped the central Congo peatlands. He told The Guardian,
“No credible company would bid for oil in the DRC’s forests and peatlands, as there is probably not enough oil to be commercially viable, and it will be expensive oil in financial, social and environmental costs.”
The oil blocks now cover a total area of 124 million hectares. That’s more than half of the country (53%).
The 2025 licensing round does exclude some high-profile protected areas. The Virunga National Park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In the 2022 oil block auction, Virunga faced significant overlap with oil blocks. This time around it has been spared.
But the report points out that this masks the fact that the oil blocks still overlap with 8.3 million hectares of protected areas and 8.6 million hectares of Key Biodiversity Areas:
These overlaps risk legal, ecological, and social conflict and threaten the integrity of places meant to be safeguarded for future generations.
But in many cases the new oil blocks are immediately adjacent to protected areas. The infrastructure developed needed to extract oil includes roads, pipelines, and settlements — all of which increase deforestation, wildlife disturbance, and land-use change.
The 2025 oil block auction covers 66.8 million hectares of the DRC’s remaining intact forests. The report notes that,
The scale of potential disturbance is staggering, especially in a country that has contributed little to global emissions but whose ecosystems play an outsized role in stabilizing the planet’s climate.
A 2022 paper published in Nature warns that the peatlands in the Congo Basin could be approaching a dangerous tipping point. “[T]he carbon stocks of the central Congo peatlands may lie close to a climatically driven drought threshold,” the paper states.
Disruption of this fragile ecosystem caused by oil extraction could accelerate the tipping point, as could burning the fossil fuel currently safely stored below the Cuvette Central peatlands.
The DRC’s 2025 licensing round includes new oil blocks that cover almost the entire DRC part of the Cuvette Central peatland. The report states that,
Extractive development in such waterlogged and carbon-rich soils carries catastrophic risk. Disruption of the peat layer through drainage, road-building, seismic testing, or drilling can expose the buried organic matter to oxygen, triggering decomposition and releasing enormous quantities of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.
Congolese civil society has spoken out against the threat of fossil fuel extraction in DRC. A series of demonstrations, press conferences, and meetings took place during a Week of Action in June 2025.
Pascal Mirindi, campaign coordinator of Notre Terre Sans Pétrole says,
“The Congolese government continues to betray our expectations. One day, it proclaims itself a ‘solution country’ in the face of the climate crisis; the next, it auctions off our forests, our land, and our lives for oil projects. This constant contradiction reveals a sad reality: Our leaders lack vision, a plan for society, and genuine love for this country.
“It is high time to adopt a truly ambitious, fair and coherent environmental policy: policy that protects our forests, our protected areas, our biodiversity and places people — local communities, young people, women and future generation — at the center of decision-making.
“We have a choice: continue digging our grave with oil, or build a livable, dignified, and sovereign future.”