The United Nations Environment Programme has identified the priority in which the causes should be addressed as slash and burn agriculture first, the collection of fuelwood second, unregulated artisanal and logging third, and road infrastructure development fourth.

The United Nations Environment Programme has identified slash and burn agriculture which produces reduced fallow periods, as the most pressing issue related to the deforestation of the DRC.

This problem has deep roots, as much of the DRC's population is dependent on this sort of slash and burn rain-fed agriculture for their sustenance.

[7] The United Nations Environment Programme's Post-conflict Environmental Assessment Synthesis for Policy Makers reported that approximately 89 hectares of forest was lost each day due to illegal fuelwood harvesting during the peak of the post-Second Congo War conflict.

One community in the North Kivu area, they demanded the logger to give them a 4x4 truck and upgrade the public infrastructures, which are not well provided for by the local government.

[17] A report by Forests Monitor and Rainforest Foundation published in 2007 [21] found that there is little evidence that industrial logging alleviates poverty, but instead actually contributes to it.

[23] However the 2023 greenhouse gas inventory by the government put 2018 emissions due to forests at about half a billion tons and absorption about the same.

[24]: 23 Further, research has demonstrated that increased replacement of tropical rainforest vegetation with savanna grasslands can produce undesired climate changes in Africa.

Researchers have also begun running simulations to predict future conditions and concluded that great biodiversity loss will result if the DRC continues its current deforestation patterns.

[26] While road access has been shown to increase land clearing for farming, it also has other indirect yet significant implications for hunting and the bushmeat trade.

[citation needed] Road construction for logging and mining decreases the distance hunters have to walk, making what was previously a multi-day trip possible to complete within a day.

Additionally, decreases in the populations of seed-dispersing animals directly affects tree regeneration rates, forest structure, and composition.

This is not the case in Kinshasa and other cities in the DRC which are experiencing population stress largely due to migrant refugees coming from the armed conflict zones in the east.

[32] Many refugees deforest the unexplored land and build squatters settlements, or slums, on the steeps, exploiting many hilly areas.

[32] Development of these hilly lands not only increase the rate of erosion but also put the inhabitants vulnerable to the risk of landslide, adding factors of insecurity to the already underprivileged community.

[31] Although these settlements are illegal, the government does not have the will nor power to form urban plans, strategies to stop people from migrating, or to regulate the migrants' behavior.

[31] Without formal sources of income, these communities practice slash-and-burn agriculture, resting the land only every 2 to 3 years, to make their ends meet.

Few small-scale projects have demonstrated an ability to help protect the integrity of the soil, but no scalable ones have been implemented due to lack of funding.

The Congo basin used to be covered by rainforest, yet an expansion of savannah in Central Africa has extending the sandy soil area because of deforestation.

The missing forest has intensified the already dichotomy climate, increasing the episodes of violent rainfall and extending the dry season.

Some fear of famine as "farmers prefer to cut trees down to make charcoal and sell it ... rather than wait two years to harvest a field of cassava".

Laws have been passed to stop the wholesale demolition of the basin, yet bribes to government officials have been speculated as to the reason why little has changed.

Additionally, most of the parties involved in the sale of wood and charcoal are former militiamen, which add elements of fear that a civil war might resume if their products were to be seized.

On April 2, 2009, the World Bank's board of directors approved a grant targeted at improving the DRC's Ministry of Environment, Nature Conservation and Tourism to handle forest projects and increase collaboration between civil society, government institutions, and other stakeholders.

Another way the government plans to address the issue of deforestation due to fuelwood is by providing electricity over certain territories to meet 60% of the needs by 2030.

This amount of wood being planted to offset fuelwood collection is minimal when considering that over 300,000 ha of forest are destroyed each year alone.

The REDD campaign is aimed at addressing climate change as all of it projects are working towards an overall world reduction in its emissions by approximately 17 Gt CO2e by 2020 in order to arrive at the GHG atmospheric concentration target of 445 parts per million (pm) of CO2e.

[38] However, research has found that the involvement of international organizations such as the World Bank has aggravated the governance crisis surrounding the DRC forests.

[41] The study found that the different incentives provided by the coalitions between international organizations and NGOs was seen as foreign interventions that went against the interests of local bureaucracies.

The event is considered as a big win to Democratic Republic of the Congo as the Salonga forest is the biggest protected rainforest in Africa.