Inside Africa’s thermostat ‘Congo Basin’

By Nneka Nwogwugwu

The Congo Basin rainforest in Central Africa is seen as Africa’s thermostat, with an area as big as Western Europe, it is the second-largest rainforest in the world.

The Basin absorbs 4% of global carbon dioxide emissions every year, offsetting more than the whole African continent’s annual emissions.

This represents about 1.1-billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year — three times the amount emitted by the UK in 2019. The Basin is Africa’s thermostat as it regulates rainfall patterns, critical to dry areas in the Sahel region and beyond.

A recent multicountry study, the first of its kind, has discovered that the Congo Basin is the world’s most resilient rainforest to extreme heat and droughts, extreme weather events caused by El Niño in 2015-2016. Rainforests in West and Central Africa were able to continue to function as carbon sinks. Similar conditions in the Amazon and Borneo rainforests led to a reduction and even a reversal of this capacity.

Six countries house the Earth’s African lung — Cameroon, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Republic of the Congo. They are all in Central Africa, many are fossil fuel-dependent, and tend to rank poorly in human development, governance and transparency indices. According to the UN, Central Africa is the worst-off African subregion with the highest concentration of people living below the poverty line on the continent.

The Congo Basin is vulnerable to deforestation mainly from smallholder charcoal production, logging and slush-and-burn agricultural initiatives to meet financial and energy needs. Although its rate of deforestation is lower than that of other rainforests, it has increased significantly over the last two decades. In particular, this is led by the DRC deforestation rate which is second only to that of the Brazilian Amazon. Civil society organisations report that restrictions during Covid-19 led to “a surge” in illegal logging as a source of income by forest communities and indigenous peoples.