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