Why do the forests of the Congo Basin matter?
Climate change is emerging as perhaps the most important international development challenge of the 21st century.
Climate change is a major threat to everyone, but it will be the world’s poorest people who are hardest hit. It is a serious risk to poverty reduction and threatens to undo decades of development efforts. The likely impacts in Africa include an increase in drought, floods, changes in rainfall patterns, and increases in sea levels, which negatively impact on water resources, food security, health and infrastructure.
Forests play a critical role in climate change by storing large quantities of carbon (by absorbing CO2) as they grow. It is estimated that deforestation is responsible for 18% of world greenhouse gas emissions. Stopping, or slowing the rate of which such forests are cleared is essential to maintaining their carbon-storing capacity and the ecological “services” they provide: biodiversity, watershed protection and recreation.
Until recently the Congo Basin forests have contributed a relatively small amount of the total emissions from land-use change (about 4% of all such emissions from the tropics in the 1980s) with less than 1% of the forest disappearing each year. However, logging, shifting agriculture, population growth and the oil and mining industries are all putting more pressure on the forest and this figure is likely to grow if the wrong policy options are pursued. If action is not taken now it is estimated that by 2040 over 2/3 of its forests will have been destroyed and countless species will be driven to extinction.