By Abbas Nazil
Africa’s forests have shifted from absorbing carbon to releasing it, marking a dramatic and concerning environmental change highlighted by new scientific research.
This transformation, which unfolded since 2010, places Africa alongside the Amazon and southeast Asian rainforest regions as contributors to global carbon emissions rather than essential buffers against climate change.
Scientists attribute the shift primarily to increased human activities, including expanding farmland to meet rising food demands, infrastructure development, and mining, all of which accelerate the destruction of forest cover.
Heating of the planet caused by the burning of fossil fuels has further weakened forest resilience, making ecosystems more vulnerable to degradation and reducing their capacity to store carbon.
Researchers found that from 2010 to 2017, African forests lost an estimated 106 billion kilograms of biomass each year, a figure roughly equal to the weight of 106 million cars.
The most severely affected regions include the tropical moist broadleaf forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar and several parts of West Africa, where tree loss has been particularly extensive.
The study, released in Scientific Reports, was conducted by experts from the National Centre for Earth Observation at the Universities of Leicester, Sheffield and Edinburgh, who relied on machine learning and satellite imagery to monitor trends in stored carbon across more than a decade.
Their analysis showed that between 2007 and 2010, African forests were still gaining carbon, but the persistent rise in forest destruction afterwards tipped the balance, causing the continent to emit more carbon than it captures.
The researchers warn that unless swift and large-scale measures are taken to halt forest loss, the world risks undermining one of its most crucial natural systems for regulating greenhouse gases.
They pointed to Brazil’s Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) as an example of a promising initiative aimed at protecting forests by compensating nations that preserve their tree cover.
The TFFF seeks to mobilise over $100 billion in funding for long-term forest conservation by creating financial incentives for countries to avoid deforestation and keep natural ecosystems intact.
However, despite the ambition behind the initiative, only a few countries have joined, collectively contributing around $6.5 billion—far below the scale needed to address the crisis.
Prof Heiko Balzter, a senior author of the study and director of the Institute for Environmental Futures at the University of Leicester, emphasized the necessity of rapidly expanding support for the TFFF to curb the accelerating forest losses.
He argued that the findings make it clear that stronger safeguards must be implemented worldwide to protect tropical forests, which remain among the most efficient natural mechanisms for carbon sequestration.
Balzter also reminded policymakers that despite global commitments made at the COP26 summit in Glasgow to end deforestation by 2030, current progress is far too slow to meet that target.
He stressed that initiatives like the TFFF offer governments and private investors a practical avenue to counter the root causes of deforestation, including mining activities and agricultural expansion, but only if more nations participate and provide adequate funding.
The study’s authors caution that without urgent intervention, forest-dependent regions in Africa and beyond may become even more substantial sources of emissions, intensifying the climate crisis and diminishing the planet’s overall capacity to recover.
