LONDON, Nov. 11 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – At the COP27 climate change conference in Egypt this week, world leaders said they would follow pledges made last year by 140 countries to protect forests. It sought to accelerate efforts to stop deforestation by 2030.
Momentum on its commitments, along with new funding commitments, including £90m ($106m) from the UK to help protect the Congo Basin, the world’s second largest rainforest A new national group was established to support the
Central Africa’s Congo Basin has more pristine forests than areas such as the Amazon, with a 5% increase in deforestation in 2021, according to a report released Thursday by environmental group Climate Focus.
Marion Ferrat, a senior consultant at Climate Focus and a co-author of the report, said the new pledge to protect the Congo Basin was encouraging, but “we need funding that reaches communities on the ground.” Stated.
Many of the promises are “very high-level” and often lack specific objectives or mechanisms to track them, she added in a telephone interview with the climate summit.
As COP27 delegates debate how to cut global warming emissions to avoid the worst effects of climate change, conservationists at the meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh are calling it a “carbon sink”. states that the role of the Congo Basin in
Carbon sinks are natural areas such as oceans and forests that absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and limit global warming.
This basin of dense tropical peatlands releases about 4% of global CO2 emissions from the atmosphere each year, according to the Central African Forest Initiative.
Threats from logging and mining
Spread across six countries, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Cameroon, the rainforest is home to over 75 million people and 10,000 species of tropical plants, from forest elephants to mountain gorillas, according to World Wildlife. It is also home to endangered wildlife. Fund (WWF).
“The Congo Basin is not only clearly important to the local and national economy, but also has the potential to combat global warming,” said Belmond Tuumba, WWF Central Africa Forest Program Coordinator.
The Climate Focus report says rainforests have been “passively” protected due to low population densities, political instability, lack of infrastructure and high risks for private investors.
While other tropical forests are severely degraded by industrial activities such as mining and agriculture, the report says most deforestation in the Congo Basin is due to small-scale subsistence farming, although this could change. there is.
The basin also faces major threats from fossil fuel exploration, illegal logging and even mining of materials that are essential for the transition to renewable energy, as they are rich in rare metals such as cobalt.
A new analysis released this week by Rainforest Foundation UK and Earth InSight reveals that more than a third of the Congo Basin now overlaps with existing or planned oil and gas exploration and production areas. .
“The world needs to do all it can to help Congo Basin countries protect their pristine forests,” said Joe Walston, executive vice president of the Wildlife Conservation Society. We have not invested significant resources.
He argues that mechanisms such as the UN’s REDD+ conservation scheme focus on responding to recent trends in deforestation, so there is less funding for pristine forests, and less in places like the Congo Basin. said.
“Intact forests are very threatened, and it’s been years since they’ve been cut down before the world intervenes,” Walston said in a telephone interview.
“Be defensive”
Analysts say the fundamental challenge is to ensure that the economic development of the Congo Basin takes place in an ecologically sustainable manner.
This is especially difficult in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the region’s most populous country, where poverty rates are high and the government is looking to increase oil production.
“The opportunity cost of forest conservation is very high given the alternative uses of forest land,” said Jack Hurd, executive director of the Tropical Forest Alliance.
He argued that large amounts of money are needed to encourage good behavior, while at the same time time is needed to create structures for sustainable development, such as strong regulation and local capacity to manage rainforests. said it was necessary.
“We’re just trying to prevent something from happening in a protected area unless we look at the whole ecosystem,” Hurd says.
A model of this kind of sustainable development could be found in Gabon, a sparsely populated country in the Congo Basin, where deforestation fell by 28% in 2021, according to a Climate Focus report.
Marie-Claire Pize, Gabon’s national representative for the environmental group The Nature Conservancy, said Gabon benefits from strict forest management standards.
Forestry operators, for example, should develop management plans for felling every 25 years, based on detailed inventories of tree species and sizes, she said.
The country also hopes carbon markets will spur more investment, with companies paying to conserve forests to offset their emissions. Her organization helps governments secure carbon credits.
At COP27 this week, a new African Carbon Markets Initiative was launched with the aim of developing a voluntary carbon market on the African continent for projects such as biodiversity conservation.
But even in Gabon, tensions could rise if communities fail to benefit from conservation, especially as the country is forced to move away from its main source of income, the oil industry, Pais said. Stated.
“We need to find ways to help maintain the forest cover we have now, and we need to do it in ways that fully support the economies of those countries.
“Otherwise, the world will pay the price.”
($1 = £0.8487)
Originally published at: https://www.context.news/nature/the-next-amazon-congo-basin-faces-rising-deforestation-threat
Reported by Jack Graham. Edited by Jumana Farouki. The Thomson Reuters Foundation is the charitable foundation of Thomson Reuters. https://www.context.news/ please visit
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