By Editorial Staff
The Congo Basin, often referred to as the world’s second lung, faces a unique and urgent set of challenges that ripple far beyond its borders. While this region teems with ecological and economic potential, it is also marred by persistent issues—from deforestation and illegal mining to political instability and socioeconomic inequalities. Beneath these visible struggles lies a deeper, interconnected web of underlying causes that intensify each challenge.
Economic exploitation, governance gaps, and the global demand for resources (external influences) converge in ways that not only threaten the region’s biodiversity and local communities but also impact climate resilience worldwide. This article unearths these root causes, offering a closer look at how they fuel cycles of hardship and environmental degradation across the Congo Basin. It specifically addresses these three underlying causes:
- Governance gaps
- Economic exploitation
- Global demand for resources (external influences)
This is the fourth article of “Echoes of the Earth: From the Congo Basin to the Amazon”, a reporting project— by Life In Humanity—that scrutinizes the vital role of these forests in maintaining global ecosystems, stabilizing climate, and supporting local communities. This project underscores the crucial need for urgent action to protect these forests, underlining that their preservation stands essential not only for the Africa continent and the world’s biodiversity but also for humanity’s future. In this regard, the following is the list of previous articles under this project:
- “Rwanda’s stake in the Congo Basin’s future —a global perspective” accessible here.
- “The heart of Africa’s climate: understanding the Congo Basin”you can reach here.
- “The Congo Basin under siege: mounting threats to the world’s second-largest rainforest” accessible here.
Governance gaps
The Africa Center for Strategic Studies (ACSS) is a U.S. Department of Defense institution that aims to advance regional security and stability across Africa by fostering strategic partnerships, policy analysis, and academic exchange. This center created in 1999 serves as a resource for African governments, military officials, and civil society leaders to engage in collaborative learning and address key security challenges affecting the continent.
ACSS published an article headlined “The Regional Security Imperative to Protect the Congo Basin” on November 4, 2024. The article was written by Denis Mahonghol. He reportedly possesses 24 years’ experience in forest governance and conservation in Central Africa. His main areas of work include forestry research, trade, timber traceability and legality, forestry and wildlife law enforcement, capacity-building for public institutions in decision-making and wildlife trade monitoring (flora and fauna). Currently, Mahonghol is Director of TRAFFIC International’s Central Africa Program Office.
He begins, underscoring the crucial importance of the Congo Bain. “Known as the planet’s ‘second lung’, the Congo Basin is one of Earth’s most vital forested regions. Comprising almost 200 million hectares of dense rainforest and peat swamp soils, the Congo Basin absorbs more carbon dioxide than any other region in the world.
Its annual net carbon dioxide absorption is six times that of the Amazon rainforest. The Congo Basin is an invaluable treasure not just for the six countries that host the bulk of the forest—Cameroon, the Central African Republic (CAR), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the Republic of the Congo—but for Africa and the world. Without an intact Congo Basin, efforts to mitigate global warming and its many extreme side effects will fall short,” it states.
The Congo Basin indeed covers a much larger area, while including the entire watershed region, but the rainforest itself—typically referred to as the Congo Basin rainforest— is generally estimated at around 168 to 178 million hectares. The broader Congo Basin region, which includes not only the rainforests but also savannas, wetlands, and rivers across the watershed, equals a staggering 300 million hectares, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)— an international non-governmental organization (NGO) focused on environmental conservation and the protection of the world’s natural resources chartered in 1961.
ACSS however says that governance issues represent underlying causes behind the crisis that the basin is facing. It reports “Unregulated logging of the Congo Basin rainforests threatens to undercut the livelihoods of millions of households in the region, empower transnational organized criminal networks, and dramatically accelerate global warming. The rapid degradation of the Congo Basin rainforests poses a threat to the livelihoods of millions who rely on the forests’ resources and the regulating role the forests play for African rain patterns and carbon sequestration.”
This center contends that weak forest management is empowering transnational organized criminal networks and armed militant groups who, it says, are playing an increasingly crucial role in resource extraction from the Congo Basin. “Illicit logging, mining, and wildlife trade in the Congo Basin is enabled by the complicity of senior public officials who profit from their positions overseeing the management of these national resources.
Better management and protection of the Congo Basin rainforests will require enhanced forest domain awareness as well as realigning the incentives for local communities, public officials, and international logging interests.”
Economic exploitation
ACSS reports “The forestry sector in the DRC accounts for 9 percent of its GDP and an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 people in the country rely on the forests for their livelihoods. Up to 55 million people in the region derive economic benefits from the forests. Due to corruption, however, local communities often only see a fraction of the financial benefits from this extraction. Pressure on the Congo Basin forests is further exacerbated by illegal wildlife trade (IWT) and illegal mining, including the high concentrations of cobalt and coltan.”
ACSS therefore points out that this constitutes both a growing security and economic threat to the region. “Given the high-value revenue streams, weak forest management, and lax government oversight of these sectors, transnational organized criminal networks and armed militant groups are playing an increasingly central role in resource extraction from the Congo Basin.”
“Threats to this ecologically unique region, in turn, will negatively impact the regulation of the continent’s water cycle and the planet’s atmosphere, making the Congo Basin an epicenter of regional and global stabilization efforts.”
Global demand for resources (external influences)
ACSS points out “The Congo Basin’s rare and high-value hardwood species are particularly in global demand. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reports that Africa’s share of rosewood exports to China rose from 40 percent in 2008 to 90 percent in 2018. China is the world’s largest importer of illegally logged wood.”
WWF in its undated article “Timber demand soars, forests shrink, species disappear” agrees with ACSS on various challenges including the external influences. It says “As forests shrink, wildlife disappears and economies sputter, one business keeps booming in the Congo Basin forests: logging. Along with pressures caused by population growth over the last decades, unregulated and often illegal extraction of timber puts wildlife, local people and economies at risk.
What rising demographics means for forests. The greatest loss of forests in recent years has occurred in countries with a high population growth. This demographic trend has led to increases in shifting cultivation (a form of subsistence farming), natural forests being converted into plantations and cash crops contributing to forest loss in the region.”
Nevertheless, population growth — according to WWF — does not stand as a severe challenge for the Congo Basin. “With human populations growing at 2% to 3% and subsistence agriculture still the main source of food and income for most people in the Congo River Basin, habitat loss, bushmeat trade and climate change are likely to be the most significant long-term threats to biodiversity.
But there’s a more serious factor affecting the prospects of the Congo Basin forests: unrelenting timber demand from around the world. China, Europe and the US are importing vast quantities of wood products from the forests of Gabon and Cameroon. These are powerful incentives for the continued extraction of wood from the Congo Basin forests. Continuing global demand for the timber resources of the region’s forests will also make conservation efforts particularly challenging.”
Root cause of all the mess negatively affecting the Congo Basin
WWF emphasizes that the problems are situated in the history of Africa, with colonization by European powers. “To understand the situation in today’s Congo River Basin, one must go back in time to the era of foreign colonization. When the region’s countries gained their independence, the colonial powers in Central Africa left an unstable and flawed foundation upon which to build modern states.”
WWF highlights that economic structures favored foreign investment, particularly in the extractive industry, and little was achieved to reinforce the capacity of citizens. “The political division of African territories may have facilitated resource extraction and tax collection, but it also seriously disrupted traditional governance, land use, trade networks and population movements.”
WWF states that the following problems harming the Congo Basin are the direct legacy of colonization which is said to have weaken the continent, instead of empowering and building its capacity. “The usual suspects. Activities such as agriculture, logging, bushmeat hunting and mineral and oil extraction have direct impacts on forests and wildlife. Population growth, conflict and disease, governance problems, lack of forest management capacity, a shortage of funding and a lack of awareness are some of the factors that worsen these issues.
A growing problem has been road-building by logging companies, which gives bushmeat hunters access to the heart of previously remote forests. This has led to extreme over-hunting of vulnerable species such as the western lowland gorilla, elephant and leopard. The chimpanzee, recently shown to be the potential source of the HIV 1 virus in humans, is also endangered. Its forest home is being logged and it continues to be hunted and sold as food in and around the Congo Basin forests.”