Congo Basin and West Africa
Overall, the Congo Basin is the world’s second-largest rainforest, comprising 18 percent of the planet's remaining tropical rainforest. Of the six nations that share the 1.5 million-square-mile basin, Gabon and the Republic of the Congo are the most promising for pursuing climate-related tropical forest conservation in the near term, although the Democratic Republic of the Congo will likely be the biggest player in forest conservation in the region in the longer term.
In the coastal countries of West Africa spanning from Nigeria to the Ivory Coast, a long strip of tropical forests is tucked between the Sahara Desert and the Atlantic Ocean. Many of these countries are experiencing rapid deforestation. The low cost of land and the carbon-rich forests create a patchwork of good locations for early investment in southern Nigeria.
Topography and Forest Ecology
The regional terrain of the Congo Basin consists of plains along the Atlantic coast and savanna and heavily forested mountains in the east. Containing more than 600 tree species and 10,000 animal species, the Congo Basin is not only home to incredible biodiversity but also one of the world’s most threatened ecosystems.
Much of West Africa is characterized by lowland tropical forests near the coast. Moving farther inland and higher in elevation, these forests change to savannas and grasslands, or occasionally montane (mountainous) forests. Toward the northern borders, the vegetation becomes more arid entering the southern part of the Sahara.
Deforestation Trends
Nations in the Congo Basin tend to have relatively low deforestation rates, ranging from as low as 0.1 percent forest loss per year in the Republic of the Congo and Central African Republic to 1 percent deforestation in Cameroon. West African nations, in contrast, have recently experienced much more rapid deforestation. According to the FAO, Nigeria has one of the highest rates in the world, at 3.3 percent, and Ghana also has very rapid deforestation, at 2 percent per year.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) also has a relatively low deforestation rate, at 0.2 percent per year, yet it accounts for 4.2 percent share of emissions from deforestation because of its vast area of forests. The DRC currently has some of the greatest governance problems of any country in the world. Civil unrest, corruption, and the lack of well-defined land tenure obstruct forest conservation and management and have resulted in deforestation driven primarily by such illegal practices as logging, fuelwood harvesting, and settlements and subsistence agriculture, even in the national parks. At the same time, civil unrest and lack of governance have kept commercial agriculture and timber at bay, such that deforestation rates have remained relatively low. Nevertheless, the lack of governance and large forest area make the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other Congo Basin countries especially vulnerable to future deforestation pressures.
According to revised figures from the FAO, Nigeria has the world’s highest deforestation rate of primary forests, defined as forests with no visible signs of past or present human activities. Between 2000 and 2005, the country lost 55.7 percent of its primary forests. The huge loss in forests makes Nigeria a potentially major supplier of forest carbon credits, once it builds the necessary capacity to address governance and market readiness concerns.
In fact, across the Congo Basin and West Africa, forest governance and market readiness are inadequate, and as a result, the primary drivers of deforestation are those common to poorly governed countries: illegal logging, subsistence agriculture, and fuelwood harvesting. While some commercial logging and agriculture do exist, even many of those operations clear forests illegally.