If the Amazon is the lungs of the world, then the Congo basin is its beating heart. This vast region in central Africa is home to the world’s second-largest – and most pristine – tropical rainforest, spanning six countries and 170 million hectares of land.
But this unique habitat, which boasts a dazzling array of wildlife from forest elephants to mountain gorillas, is in trouble. Last year, forest loss in the Congo basin jumped by 30,000 hectares, a rise of 4.9 per cent compared with the previous three-year average, according to analysis in a released last week at the COP27 summit. Logging, industrial mining and commercial agriculture are the biggest drivers.
This could have global implications, warns the report’s lead author, at consultancy firm Climate Focus. The forest is “crucial for meeting climate goals; it’s an immense carbon sink”, she says.
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The Forest Declaration Assessment’s findings are backed by the World Resources Institute, which suggests the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was second only to Brazil in terms of the largest area of tropical forest lost in 2021.
Experts fear the trend will accelerate as countries move to exploit their natural resources. , also released last week, warns that land twice the size of Germany earmarked for oil and gas development overlaps with areas of pristine tropical forests in the Congo basin. The Congo basin is rich in copper, cobalt and coltan – all minerals in high demand for manufacturers of electronics – and mining in the region continues to expand.
The Congo rainforest is home to the largest expanse of tropical peatlands on Earth, storing the equivalent of three years of global fossil fuel emissions in the soil. As climate change disrupts rainfall patterns, those peatlands could tip into drought and release this “carbon bomb” into the atmosphere, according to at the University of Leeds, UK, and his colleagues.
The dry season in the Congo rainforest has already lengthened by six to 10 days in recent decades, pushing the region closer to that dangerous tipping point.
Ask locals and they will say the change is obvious. Dominique Bikaba, the founder of Strong Roots, a conservation organisation in the DRC, says: “We have issues with climate change, and it’s real.”
Each year, Bikaba’s team waits for the rainy season that starts in September so trees can be planted in deforested tracts of land. But this year is different. “In September, we didn’t have any rain. We don’t have rain now,” he says. “We have more than 200,000 seedlings right now that are waiting for rain.”
Yet despite the worrying signals, there are signs of hope from people living within the rainforest. Bikaba is one of hundreds of grassroots campaigners taking advantage of a decree passed in the DRC in 2014, which gave communities the right to manage the local forest for conservation.
In August, Strong Roots secured a series of official titles creating 21 community forests across South Kivu in eastern DRC. The protected areas together span 600,000 hectares – two-thirds of it intact rainforest . The network will create a wildlife corridor between the Kahuzi-Biega National Park and the Itombwe Nature Reserve, helping to protect the world’s only population of the eastern lowland gorilla (Gorilla beringei graueri).
Guardians of the forest
Bikaba insists that working with the people who live in the forests is the best way to protect these ecosystems. Evidence backs him up: by Jocelyne Sze at the University of Sheffield, UK, and her colleagues found that forest cover in Africa was better preserved on Indigenous lands than in officially protected areas.
There are now more than 150 community forest concessions in the DRC, according to and another 42 in waiting. In all, these cover almost 3.5 million hectares of rainforest. Other nations across the Congo basin are also implementing similar schemes.
But campaign groups say this approach is still underfunded. At the COP26 summit last year, countries including the UK, the US and Germany partnered with major corporations to promise $1.7 billion of financing to support Indigenous communities’ role as “guardians of forest and nature”. However, a study published in September by suggests that Indigenous peoples are only set to receive a fraction of that funding under current structures.
Joseph Itongwa from the Walikale territory in the DRC has travelled to COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, to urge world leaders to live up to their promises to provide support for Indigenous communities. After all, they have the strongest incentives to protect the forest, he says. “We consider the forests as our environment where we live, but also this is the place of our identity,” he says. “We are the first victims of deforestation.”
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