The Challenge for Africa (34 page)

One such project was formulated in 2006 at the annual meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Nairobi. The Green Belt Movement, UNEP, and the World Agroforestry Center (ICRAAF) launched the Plant for the Planet: Billion Tree Campaign to encourage tree planting as a means of mitigating global climate change, while restoring habitats and ecosystems. Prince Albert II of Monoco and I served as patrons of the campaign. From the outset, the partner organizations were aware that for the project to succeed, a wide variety of participants, from the government through to the private sector, as well as individuals and citizen groups, would have to cooperate. The sheer scale of the action—planting one billion new trees by the end of 2007—necessitated the engagement and participation of governments, organizations, and millions of individuals. By October of that year, we had achieved our goal.

Initiatives like the Billion Tree Campaign, while essential, shouldn't provide an excuse for industrialized countries not to take serious and immediate steps to reduce their greenhouse gasses. Both developed and developing countries must take action to deal with the negative impacts of emissions. To me, this is a matter of environmental justice and the price for peace. It should be addressed more responsibly by all.

The world's forests are its lungs. Thick, healthy stands of indigenous trees absorb huge amounts of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas, and hold vast reserves of carbon. As these forests are cleared for timber, agriculture, mining activities, human settlements, or commercial development, a vital element in slowing, and ultimately reversing, global warming is lost, and local, regional, and global climates will be further
destabilized. In a vicious cycle, as climate change continues, forests will become more vulnerable: soils may dry up and trees die on a mass scale. At the 2007 meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Bali, Indonesia, both government officials and NGOs signed on to the “Forests Now Declaration.” Its main tenet: If we lose forests, we lose the fight against climate change.

THE EARTH
is enriched by the rain forests of Amazonia and Borneo and the taiga of northern Canada, Russia, and Scandinavia. Africa, too, has the great forests of the Congo Basin in central Africa. Nowhere else in Africa is there a greater abundance of remaining forest, or is the threat to it more pressing, than here. Conserving this region presents an extraordinary opportunity to African heads of state, the international community, and the peoples of the basin. It also requires a reimagining of what “development” means—not only across Equatorial Africa, but throughout the continent and, indeed, the world. If the three legs of the African stool are recreated here, and the seat of the stool is made broad and strong by national and international policies and action, this region could be a model for governments, international agencies, civil society, and the private sector. It is perhaps the ultimate challenge to Africa, and the world.
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The Congo Basin Rainforest Ecosystem is a vast expanse of seven hundred thousand square miles, parts of which are present principally in Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville). The ecosystem constitutes a quarter of the world's remaining tropical rainforest, and provides almost a third of all of Africa's vegetation cover. The basin includes a large number of forests, as well as savannah, woodlands, and aquatic and riverine habitats. The forest and marine ecosystems of the Congo Basin contain
the most biodiversity in Africa, while the region as a whole has more United Nations Natural World Heritage sites than the rest of Africa put together.

The basin holds ten thousand species of plants, of which 30 percent are endemic; over a thousand species of birds; nine hundred varieties of butterflies; four hundred mammal species; and more than two hundred species each of reptiles and amphibians. It is home to both lowland and mountain gorillas, around four thousand elephants, and nine thousand chimpanzees. It is also home to the bonobo, a highly endangered primate, and the threatened okapi, a cousin of the giraffe, and new species are still being discovered.

In addition to its wide range of biotic life, the ecosystem provides a home for perhaps up to half a million Batwa (the Pygmies), whose culture has been traced back some twenty thousand years. Indeed, evidence suggests that humans have occupied the forests of the Congo Basin for at least fifty thousand years. Today, around 50 million people from more than 150 distinct micro-nations live in the ecosystem, including small-scale farmers and hunter-gatherers; however, more than 100 million depend on the Congo Basin forests for their livelihoods, food, and shelter.

Scientists estimate that somewhere between twenty-four and thirty-four billion tons of carbon are contained within the region's forests (equivalent to four years of the current production of man-made carbon dioxide). Through their natural cycle of degradation and regeneration, the forests already release 237 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere annually. If the forests were wholly destroyed, an astonishing 135 billion tons of carbon dioxide would be released.

The science of forests here, however, is inexact. The extent of any large forest is hard to measure, not least because it contains different types of forest, with different densities and thus different masses of trees. It is also not clear how forests will
respond to climate change. Should the climate become drier and warmer, a forest may release more carbon because of the decrease in moisture, but increased photosynthesis from the higher temperatures may allow forests to grow more quickly or denser, and thus store more carbon. Finally, not all forests are used in the same way—they may be clear-cut, partially logged, or sustainably harvested. If the land that was once forest is reforested, it may be able to reabsorb carbon once more, and perhaps even more efficiently.

The Congo Basin forests' effect on the climate is also not limited to the reduction or increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The forests play a major role in determining weather around the continent. Here, too, our understanding of global climatic patterns is still evolving, as are our models for determining just how the climate will change in the forthcoming decades. Here, too, the Congo Basin provides a good example of the complexities and interconnections of the planet's weather systems.

What we know is that while up to 95 percent of the rain that falls within the Congo Basin region stays there, the basin's convection systems—the movement of moisture as it rises into the atmosphere from the transpiration and evaporation of water generated in the forest canopy and the soil—mean that the basin's rainfall patterns affect a much broader area. Indeed, scientists have discovered that Central Africa provides much of the rain for West Africa.

Just as deforestation in West Africa has affected rainfall in Central Africa, so deforestation in the Congo Basin has an impact on weather patterns, not merely locally but also throughout the continent and even beyond its shores. Scientists estimate that the cutting down of trees in the Congo Basin has led to an average 5 to 15 percent drop in the amount of rain that falls in the Great Lakes region of the United States—reaching a peak of 35 percent less each February. At the same time, rainfall has
been reduced by as much as a quarter immediately north of the Black Sea.

Some models suggest that, should the entire basin be deforested, monsoon rain patterns could be affected worldwide and there would be both drier and wetter weather over the American Midwest and the southern part of central Asia, as well as central Europe. In Africa itself, experts forecast that less rain would fall over eastern and western Africa, but more over the southern areas of the DRC and southern Africa. Temperatures would rise in the region by perhaps five degrees Celsius. Some studies indicate that there would be a 30 percent increase in rainfall in East Africa and the Arabian peninsula. Within the Congo Basin itself, decreased rainfall patterns may result in the vegetation of some of its forests shifting to woodland or even savannah ecosystems, bringing about collapses in local biodiversity.

Forests also play an important role in regulating the global albedo—the amount of light that is reflected off the Earth's surface and which can either increase or decrease temperatures. Once more, scientists are only just discovering the complex role that trees, whether in temperate or tropical climates, play in the albedo; research suggests that deforestation in the tropics, including in the Congo Basin, will likely increase temperatures and decrease albedo.

Over half of the Congo Basin forests are located in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire). During the late 1990s and early 2000s, armies from nine surrounding countries, along with numerous militias, fought for control over the abundant reserves of natural resources such as timber (and wood products such as charcoal), gold, copper, diamonds, coltan, cobalt, zinc, and other minerals. That this was truly an international war, beyond the reaches of central Africa, was
confirmed by a report that experts prepared for the UN Security Council, which found that up to eighty-five multinational corporations from the United States, Europe, and South Africa had done business with criminal networks operating in the DRC.

The war was, in many ways, merely the latest fight to utilize the forests' resources stretching back to the days of Mobutu Sese Seko, who as the president of Zaire enriched himself and his coterie for three decades at the expense of his people. This conflict mirrored the exploitation of the Belgian colonial administration that preceded Mobutu, and the Belgian king Leopold II, who ran the Congo as his personal estate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

For the poor who live in the Congo Basin, hunting for bush-meat and the collection and burning of firewood for charcoal are the highest sources of income. Wood and charcoal constitute four-fifths of the energy used in the households of the DRC, while bushmeat has provided the peoples of the Congo forest with a vital source of food for centuries. Recently, however, the subsistence-level hunting in the forest that sustained the local communities has expanded and intensified to threaten the wildlife that populates the entire basin. Some one million tons of bushmeat is now consumed annually, and around thirteen thousand pounds (most of it in the form of primate flesh) arrive in Europe and North America every month, where it is consumed as a delicacy by expatriate Africans and others.

The increase in the number of animals killed for bushmeat is directly correlated with the opening up of the forest to logging companies. Penetrating the parts of the forest previously unreachable by mechanized transport, the timber trucks literally make inroads and, as they do, allow easier access to the animals. The results can be dramatic. A mere twenty days after
a logging company arrived in one of Congo's forests, the density of animals there declined by more than a quarter.

About a quarter of the rain forest area of the Congo Basin has been divided up into timber concessions. The irony is that timber itself has an economic value far below the other products that come from the forest—such as medicines, plant foods, and condiments—even though it is the sector where there is the greatest danger of the misuse or plundering of public resources. Penetration of the forest brings about its own risks as well. Increased contact with the animals of the forest has enhanced the possibility of exposure to diseases, such as Ebola, that can cross the species barrier.
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Such tropical diseases, along with HIV/AIDS and malaria, only further complicate, and in some cases hinder, efforts to conserve the forest.

In a recognition of the importance of the Congo Basin to their countries' forest ecosystems, the heads of state of six surrounding countries issued the Yaoundé Declaration in 1999, in which they agreed to establish a framework for new conservation efforts throughout the region. Because of the conflict in the DRC, however, little was implementable at that time. In September 2002, at the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, the United States and South Africa joined with twenty-seven other partners, both public and private, to launch the Congo Basin Forest Partnership (CBFP), to conserve the basin through economic development, poverty alleviation, better governance, and the establishment of a network of protected areas. The CBFP also issued a code to try to ensure that any contracts awarded to private corporations by the region's governments seeking to exploit the forests' resources were well managed.

This last provision—which, among other stipulations, mandated that all companies should consult local people, allow them to keep all their rights as traditional users of the forest, and ensure that 15 percent of the concession area was protected—was long overdue. It sought to address the concessions for many millions of acres of forest that had been handed out or bought both before and during the war. In spite of efforts to establish a moratorium on new concessions, a number of new contracts have been offered to logging and mining companies since 2002. Instructively, perhaps, these corporations are headquartered, or have offices in, Belgium, Liechtenstein, Portugal, Germany, Great Britain, Sweden, Switzerland, China, Canada, Singapore, and the United States, as well as Côte d’Ivoire, Congo-Brazzaville, and the DRC. Some of them have received investment funds through the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank, which was instrumental in supporting the 2002 moratorium.