Africa’s Congo basin, vital to earth’s climate, is critically understudied

The Congo Basin is the world’s biggest tropical storehouse of carbon, its forest stretching almost across the African continent and covering an area larger than India.

Yet little is known about it.

Now a group of almost 200 scientists, who collectively make up the Science Panel for the Congo Basin, is trying to change that. The panel, which launched its first report in Brazzaville in the Congo Republic in May, aims to secure funding to train 1 000 PhDs over the next decade.

Ramping up research is key to understanding and protecting the expanse, which dictates the weather patterns of a continent, is home to a fifth of the world’s living species and absorbs as much CO2 as Germany emits annually, experts say.

The forest is at risk from slash-and-burn agriculture, where farmers set fires to make room for crops, as well as logging, mining and demand for charcoal, used by growing populations for cooking.

Read: The world has a decade to save biggest tropical carbon sink

“We need an investment in better understanding the Congo basin and in creating a generation of Congo Basin scientists who will be the ones to defend the ecosystem,” said the panel’s Special Envoy Lee White, a UK-born zoologist who has served as Gabon’s environment minister.

“I’m convinced that if we lose the Congo basin, Africa is not viable.”

The push mirrors that undertaken by Brazilian researchers over the last three decades in the Amazon basin, greatly increasing knowledge about the rainforest.

Surveys indicate there are about 120 scientists from Congo basin nations publishing on issues related to the forest there, a small fraction of the thousands who study the Amazon.

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“It’s quite dismaying. That’s why we know so much more about the Amazon than we do about the Congo basin,” White said.

The panel is approaching potential funding sources such as the African Development Bank and the Hasso Plattner Foundation – endowed by a co-founder of German software giant SAP SE – to back the initiative, which White estimates will cost tens of millions of dollars.

So far £9 million ($12.1 million) has been raised from the UK government, enough to fund up to 30 master’s degrees and around 15 PhDs, White said.

Universities in Congo basin nations are often poorly resourced and scientists there have limited career paths.

Read: Africa establishes a space agency to close its climate data gap

“When people do their PhDs in the Congo basin, they go to ministries, administrative work; they leave the field,” said Bila-Isia Inogwabini, a professor of biodiversity at the Catholic University of Congo in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“Or they stay in the Western world where they have better job offers. Many people I studied with in [the UK], they think I am crazy to have come back.”

What’s needed, White and scientists including Inogwabini say, is twinning better-resourced universities in places such as Europe and the US with institutions in the Congo Basin, which stretches from Cross River in Nigeria to the Rift Valley in East Africa.

Scientists on the panel teach at universities in Cameroon and Gabon as well as the US, the UK and the European Union.

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Working across the forest belt of central Africa is challenging. The eastern flank of the Democratic Republic of Congo has been engulfed in conflict for three decades and there was a coup in Gabon in 2023.

Backing from the Brazilian government was essential for the sister initiative in the Amazon, which launched its own science panel in 2019, said Emma Torres, the strategic coordinator for the Science Panel for the Amazon. Continuity of that support through different political cycles has been key, she said.

Central Africa is home to some of the world’s poorest countries, which limits government support for scientists – and carries a stigma in spite of major advances in conservation.

Read: Africa’s climate finance rules are growing, but they’re weakly enforced

“There is a negative feeling out there that this is the heart of darkness in the Congo basin, and you cannot achieve much,” said White.

“That’s something I would obviously disagree with. If you look at performance of the Congo basin in terms of creating new protected areas and so on, they’re probably leading the world in terms of progress.”

The stigma has also shaped the careers of scientists from the region.

“I did my PhD on the Amazonian Brazilian ecosystem. So that is very, kind of funny,” said Lydie-Stella Koutika, a soil scientist from the Republic of the Congo and one of three co-chairs of the science panel.

“I saw the forest of the Amazon before seeing the forest ecosystem in the Congo basin.”

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