Congo Basin Rainforest

The ''Congo Basin Rainforest'' is the second largest in the world after the Amazon.The Congo Basin Rainforest covers 180 million hectares, spreading across the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), most of Congo-Brazzaville, the southeast of Cameroon, southern Central African Republic (CAR), Gabon and Equatorial Guinea.

 

The Congo Basin forest, is becoming seriously endangered as Europe, America and Asia's appetite for tropical wood increases. If it is destroyed, it would leave millions homeless, drive plants and animals to extinction and would release billions of tonnes of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

Congo Basin forest area hosts a wealth of biodiversity, including over 10,000 species of plants, 1,000 species of birds, and 400 species of mammals, and three of the world's four species of great apes. It is also home to more than 24 million people, many of which depend on the forest for their livelihoods. The Congo basin forests not only play a critical role for global biodiversity conservation, they also provide vital regional and global ecological services as a carbon sink and catchment basin.

Logging, shifting agriculture, population growth and the oil and mining industries are all putting pressure on the Congo basin forests, which are disappearing at the rate of 0.6% a year.