World has a decade to save biggest tropical carbon sink

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.

- ANTONY SGUAZZIN

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 on Monday for the COP 30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil.

The region’s forests currently absorb 600 million tonne 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 4.5 billion tonne of carbon, almost equal to what the US emits, 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.