Online Reporter
The Congo Basin, a region of tropical forest larger than India, is at a point where further damage may rob the world of a crucial bulwark against climate change.
That’s the conclusion of the first comprehensive scientific report about the state of the environment in a region that stretches from Cross River in Nigeria to the Rift Valley in East Africa. An executive summary of the 800-page report, authored by 177 experts from across the basin and beyond, was released Monday for the COP 30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil.
The region’s forests currently absorb 600 million tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide a year, equivalent to Germany’s emissions. That makes the basin the world’s biggest tropical carbon sink. But deforestation is threatening to upend the forests’ ability to remove carbon from the atmosphere, a shift that would endanger the world’s climate.
“If we don’t get a handle on it in the next decade, it will be out of control,” Lee White, Gabon’s former environment minister, said in an interview.
“There’s a huge problem developing that we aren’t solving and a huge opportunity that we’re missing.”
Two decades ago, the Congo Basin absorbed 1,5 billion tons of carbon, according to White. But slash-and-burn agriculture, where farmers set fires to create room for crops, an increase in logging and rising demand for charcoal are shrinking the forests.
“The Congo Basin stands at a decisive crossroads,” the scientists said in the report, which follows a similar publication on the Amazon region released at the 2021 COP meeting.
It’s home to “unparalleled biodiversity, but it’s also a region of rapid population growth, persistent poverty, weak governance and competing demands for development.”
The Congo Basin ranks among the world’s most biodiverse areas, boasting 10 000 plant species and forests that provide homes for four species of great apes, as well as forest elephants and okapis, an endangered relative of the giraffe.
The Amazon rainforest covers an area almost twice the size. The world’s other carbon sinks, including permafrost and northern forests, also are under threat as the planet warms.
“If you lose the Congo Basin, you lose the water,” said White — Bloomberg
