A study published last week in the journal ‘Nature’ revealing that trees in the Congo Basin Forest are losing their capacity to absorb carbon dioxide was momentous news.
It noted how scientists are worried about the health of the world’s second-largest contiguous rainforest after the Amazon, and the implications this might have on climate change.
The study, which looked at intact forests – those that are untouched by logging or fires – finds a much-reduced sink capacity of the rainforest. From 46 billion tonnes removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the 1990s, it is now only able to remove an estimated 25 billion tonnes.
That is a difference of 21 billion tonnes of unremoved carbon dioxide, nearly half of the previous capacity.
The new data provides the first large-scale evidence that tropical rainforests around the world that have been untouched by logging or other human activity are losing their potency to fight climate change.
It is thought that increasing increased temperatures and reduced rainfall could be stifling the growth of the rainforest trees, thus reducing their capacity to absorb carbon dioxide. The phenomenon was previously noted in the Amazon.
The scientists predict that by 2030 the African forests’ capacity to remove carbon will decrease by 14 per cent, while Amazonian forests may stop removing carbon dioxide altogether by 2035.
This could be the swan song for the tropical forests. It has long been feared that one of Earth’s largest carbon sinks would switch to become a source. This process has, unfortunately, begun, the scientists lament.
They are alarmed that, by the middle of the century, the remaining uncut tropical forests in Africa, the Amazon and Asia’s Malay Archipelago will release more carbon dioxide than they take up. This could lead to severe global warming and eventual destruction of the forests.
Aside from the grim prediction, could the sink capacity of the Congo Basin Forest be salvaged?
In March last year, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) announced the Congo Basin Sustainable Landscapes Program, a six-country initiative to address environment degradation in the basin.
The US$63-million program aims to stabilize forest cover, peatlands, and wildlife populations in the Basin spanning 530 million hectares across the six countries—Cameroon, Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and the Republic of the Congo.
This is in acknowledgement of the basin’s peatland complex buffering effects on climate change. One metre of peat—dead branches and leaves that have become mud—contains more than three times the amount of carbon as the forest above.
But the program is also about the diversity of plants and animals, the largest in Africa, including the largest population of the endangered Forest Elephant, as well as comprising a large part of the range of the Chimpanzee and the entire range of the Bonobo and Western Lowland Gorilla.
Rwanda’s mountain gorillas are a subspecies of the eastern lowland gorilla in the Congo Basin’s lowland forest extending to eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) into habitats north of Rwanda.
The six-year Congo Basin Sustainable Landscapes Program will address the drivers of forest loss and degradation in the region. One of the drivers is roads. While they facilitate development in remote forest regions, it is often with detrimental consequences for ecosystems.
Another driver is heavy reliance on natural resource exploitation by countries in the basin and a growing population, all of which threaten the sustainability of the region’s 300 million hectares of forest.
The Congo Basin Forest comprises some 70 percent of Africa’s entire forest cover, and it is shrinking fast.
The six countries bear some blame and, with 60 per cent of the rainforest in DRC, it lends the country to scrutiny for its sheer size, offering an example of how the forest is losing cover.
Some estimates suggest that between 2001 and 2018 the country lost 13 million hectares of tree cover, around 6 per cent of the entire rainforest. Poverty and charcoal trade are said to be partly to blame.
Sellers pile charcoal onto boats in River Congo and float it to Kinshasa. Farmers add to the problem chopping down trees to make space for crops as the population keeps growing.
The GEF Program will work to create a better enabling environment for forest governance, support land use planning, strengthen the management and financing of protected areas, and decrease the impacts of natural resource use by local communities and the private sector.
The program will play its bit, adding on to others such as Conservation and Rational Use of Forest Ecosystems in Central Africa (ECOFAC), Central Africa Regional Programme for the Environment (CARPE) and the Congo Basin Forest Fund (CBFF).
The views expressed in this article are of the author.