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Ground Impact - the PES Planning Tool - Central African Forest Initiative (CAFI)
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Ground Impact – the PES Planning tool

A geospatial platform to plan, optimise and finance payments for environmental services across six Congo Basin countries — from analysis to decision, in a few clicks.

Designing an effective PES programme in the Congo Basin means navigating millions of hectares, thousands of villages and a vast space of possible activities and budgets. Ground Impact removes the guesswork. It combines more than 28 open scientific datasets — satellite land cover, annual forest-loss maps, biomass, forest integrity, population and wealth — with linear-programming optimisation, and returns investment-ready programme designs for any zone: a single territory (territoire in DRC), a province, a country, the whole basin, or a boundary you draw yourself.

3 questions, one engine

Potential

“How much PES can this landscape realistically support?”

Estimates the land that can be enrolled by activity, the households and villages that can take part, the full cost envelope and the climate outcomes — from real data for each territory, not national averages.

  • Excludes protected areas and logging concessions
  • Assesses household and village capacity
  • Attaches an uncertainty range to every figure
  • Identifies which activities reach the goal

 

Target

“How can a given goal be reached at the lowest cost?”

A linear-programming solver finds the least-cost activity mix for 6 challenges: deforestation, NDC gap, poverty, food security, high-integrity forest, and fires.

  • Identifies which activities reach the goal cheapest — and where
  • Maximum attainable level computed robustly and transparently
  • Explains step by step what limits the result — adoption, land, capacity

 

Budget

“What can a given budget achieve?”

Maximises impact under a budget constraint — concentrated for best value per dollar, or balanced across your priorities for multi-objective portfolios.

  • Set your own priorities — carbon, income, food security
  • Packs the result into ready-to-launch~$10 M projects
  • Shows how results change with a higher or lower budget

Built for Central Africa

Ground Impact reflects and operationalises the priorities of the Central African Forest Initiative and its national partners: country-led, national-scale planning; results-based finance; and transparent reporting that donors can verify. Operationally, this means that the Ground Impact Tool :

  • Designs and costs performance-based PES portfolios country by country, in each country’s own administrative vocabulary
  • Grounds Nationally Determined Contributions and investment-framework discussions in explicit, auditable data for every area
  • References every assumption, that are editable and exported with each report — to produce traceable, reproducible decisions
  • Models direct payments to households and communities down to the number of mobile-money transfers and their fees

A tool you can trust

Radical transparency

Every parameter carries a source note, every value is editable, and each report exports the full assumption set. 

Provenance on every value

A data-quality badge reports the share of measured values for the selected zone — 97.6% basin-wide — with gaps itemised.

Honest ceilings

When a target is out of reach, the tool says so — and decomposes exactly why: adoption, effectiveness, land, capacity, ineligible ground.

Reproducible uncertainty

Every headline number carries a low–high uncertainty range, and re-running the tool gives the same answer — results you can defend.

Maps, not just numbers

Per-pixel allocation maps show where each activity lands — oriented by your objective, downloadable for use in standard mapping software

Payments made bankable

Direct payments modelled to the transfer: instalments, mobile-money share, fees — the operational backbone of results-based finance

Need some examples ? PES Budget scenarios

The table below is a brief snapshot of scenarios generated by the tool. Each column is a complete programme design, with its PES activity mix, project pipeline, beneficiary payments and climate outcome. Each figure comes with a low–high range (not displayed here for brevity) reflecting the model’s uncertainty. Below are only figures – every time a user runs a model, the system generates a narrative executive report, an Excel technical annex, GeoTIFF allocation maps for GIS teams. It also saves scenarios so you may reopen them across devices.

  $50 M $100 M $500 M $46.7 billion
full Bassin potential
Land under PES 532,000 ha 1.08 Mha 5.39 Mha 35 Mha
Households receiving payments 64,600 143,600 685,000 12.6 M
Additional indirect households benefiting 84,000 187,000 890,000 households,
136,700 FTE jobs supported		 43 M
Deforestation avoided — — 81,500 ha/yr 634,000 ha/yr
CO2e avoided & sequestered (5 yrs) 16.2 MtCO2e 30.8 MtCO2e 102 MtCO2e 939 MtCO2e
Cost per tonne ~$3.2 / tCO2e ~$3.2 / tCO2e ~$4.9 / tCO2e —

FTE = full-time employment. Scroll horizontally on small screens to see all columns.

Start planning today

See it live in your browser

Pick any territory, province or Central African country, and get an investment-ready PES programme design in seconds

Data sources

  • Hansen GFC 2025 · forest loss 2001–2025 · 30 m
  • ESA WorldCover 2021 · land cover · 10 m
  • ESA CCI Biomass v6 · carbon density · 100 m
  • JRC Tropical Moist Forest · degradation · 30 m
  • GFW carbon flux v1.4 · emission factors · 30 m
  • FLII · forest integrity (HCV) · 300 m
  • ForestAtRisk (CIRAD) · deforestation risk · 30 m
  • WRI / DeepMind drivers · loss drivers · 1 km
  • Cook-Patton regrowth · sequestration · 1 km
  • WorldPop 2025 · population · 100 m
  • FAO GAEZ v4 · crop suitability
  • Relative Wealth Index · income baseline
  • MODIS burned area · fire regime · 500 m
  • WDPA 2024 + concessions · exclusions

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