MAPUTO, Mozambique
Sections of a renowned peatland tropical forest in the Congo Basin that plays a crucial role in Africa’s climate system go up for oil and gas auction in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Thursday.
The DRC government will
auction 30 oil and gas blocks in the Cuvette-Centrale Peatlands in the Congo
Basin Forest — the world’s largest tropical peatland. Peatland soils are known
as ‘carbon sinks’ because packed into them are immense stores of carbon that
get released into the atmosphere when the ecosystem is disturbed.
Some of the areas, or blocs,
marked for oil leasing lie within Africa’s iconic first conservation area, the
Virunga National Park, created in 1925 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, home
to the last bastion of mountain gorillas.
The Congo basin covers 530
million hectares (1.3 billion acres) in central Africa and represents 70% of
the continent’s forested land. It hosts over a thousand bird species and more
primates than any other place in the world, including the great apes: gorillas,
chimpanzees and Bonobos.
People are at risk, too.
Members of the Mbuti and Baka people could be displaced or evicted.
The move by the Congo-Kinshasa
Ministry of Hydrocarbons has angered environmentalists and climate activists
who say that oil drilling will pose significant risks to a continent already
inundated by harsh climate effects. The Centre for International Forest
Research puts the massive Cuvette-Centrale carbon sink at 145,000 square
kilometers (56,000 square miles) and said it stores up to 20 years’ equivalent
of the carbon emissions emitted by the United States.
Other blocs the DRC plans to
auction include some located on Lake Kivu, Lake Tanganyika, and one in a
coastal region alongside the Albertine-Grabben region, the western side of the
Eastern African Rift Valley system.
“These are the last refuges of
nature biodiversity,” and our last carbon sinks, said Ken Mwathe, of BirdLife
International in Africa. “We must not sacrifice these valuable natural assets
for damaging development.”
The auction of part of the
Congo Basin rainforest, which represents 5% of the global tropical forests,
comes barely a week after the International Union for the Conservation of
Nature hosted the inaugural Africa Protected Areas Congress in Kigali, Rwanda.
There, attendees resolved to strengthen protection of Africa’s key biodiversity
hotspots.
The DRC is one of 17 nations
in the world classified as “megadiverse.” In September last year, at the World
Conservation Congress meeting in France, 137 resolutions dubbed the “Marseille
Manifesto” highlighted the significant role the Congo Basin is expected to play
in the global commitment to protect 30% of the Earth by 2030.
Last year at the U.N. climate
conference COP26, a dozen donors dubbed the Glasgow Leaders Declaration on
Forests and Land Use, pledged some $1.5 billion “to working collectively to
halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030.”
The Democratic Republic’s
carbon sponge is also at risk from large-scale logging, expansion of
agriculture and the planned diversion of the Congo River’s waters into the
shrinking Lake Chad.
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