CASE STUDY

Mercy Corps’ FARM Program - Democratic Republic of Congo

EI platform modules were used in the North Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, to assess baseline ecosystem service production for a 12k hectare watershed, evaluate climate change-related risks associated with agricultural value chain expansion, and provide landscape intervention design recommendations to restore ecosystem services and strengthen community resilience as part of food security and conflict reduction program.

Across all communities in the watershed, flooding emerged as the most consistent ecosystem service-related threat to health and wellbeing.

With most communities co-located along the same drainage, watershed management was crucial to the area.

To diagnose the problem and understand which areas of the land would benefit most from watershed restoration, data needed to run the EI models was collected in the field, the models were run and the results were shared with local communities.

Working together with local residents, priority interventions were identified, the benefits of those interventions were modeled, and intervention projects were installed on the ground as part of a community knowledge-transfer effort.