Achieving sustainable development: what’s happening in the Congo Basin?

Conserving the Congo Basin is essential for preserving biodiversity and averting climate catastrophe. But safeguarding this precious ecosystem has to be balanced with the needs of some of the world’s poorest people. Managing the environmental and economic interconnections is a global challenge.

The Congo Basin provides 30% of Africa’s fresh water and offers vital irrigation to around 75 million people. It is the sedimentary basin of the Congo (see Figure 1), the second longest river in Africa – stretching 4,700km – and the deepest in the world at 220m.

From its source in the highlands of northern Zambia to its mouth on the Atlantic coast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the river snakes through thousands of miles of dense jungle and sticky marshland. The Congo Basin covers four million square kilometres, and spans six countries: Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the DRC, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon.

Much of the basin is covered by tropical rainforest, which is second only to the Amazon in size and the largest in Africa. Satellite images highlight its vast expanse, with the moss-like cloud of green stretching across the western side of the continent, lush and verdant even from miles overhead.

Figure 1: Map of the Congo Basin

Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica

The Congo Basin is an extraordinarily diverse ecosystem. There are over 10,000 species of tropical plants – 30% of which cannot be found anywhere else on earth. Around 400 different mammals and 1,000 species of bird call the basin their home. Below the surface of the river live more than 700 species of fish (Harrison et al, 2016). The number of insects is greater still, with the area boasting 370,000 species of beetle alone and 550 different types of butterfly.

But the rainforest and its inhabitants are under threat. Timber extraction poses a major risk to the ecology of the region as well as to the wider climate. In 2021, deforestation in the Congo Basin increased by almost 5%, with more than 630,000 hectares of land cleared for logging (Cavallito, 2022). So, in just 12 months, an area of rainforest the size of Los Angeles was stripped bare by the timber industry.

In terms of logging, the Central African Republic is the worst offender, with deforestation rates increasing by 71% from 2018 to 2021. By 2050, the Congo rainforest will have shrunk by more than a quarter based on current trends (Observatoire des Forêts d'Afrique Centrale, OFAC, 2021).

This is equivalent to a forest the size of Egypt being wiped out over the next two and half decades, which would have devastating consequences for the basin’s biodiversity. From the smallest bugs to the mighty elephants, deforestation risks extinction for many of the Congo’s unique creatures.

The lungs of Africa

The Congo Basin is also a vital carbon sink, meaning that it absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Known as ‘the lungs of Africa’, the basin’s peatlands store the equivalent of three years’ worth of global fossil fuel emissions (Hess, 2024).

According to research by the World Bank, the Congo rainforest is the largest carbon sink in the world, with the section of jungle in the Republic of the Congo alone absorbing 1.5% of the entire planet’s carbon emissions (World Bank, 2023).

Tropical rainforests draw in more carbon from the atmosphere than temperate or boreal forests. But they are also being destroyed at increasing speeds, predominantly for palm oil plantations and mineral mining, among other projects.

For example, studies show that since the early 2000s the rainforests across Southeast Asia have collectively become a net source of carbon emissions due to ‘clearing for plantations, uncontrolled fires and drainage of peat soils’ (Harris and Gibbs, 2021).

Once a certain ratio of trees is removed, the emissions caused by decaying plant matter left over from logging start to exceed the carbon absorbed by the collective photosynthesis of the woodland. Cut enough of it down and a rainforest switches from helping to clean the atmosphere to polluting it (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Carbon fluxes from three major rainforests, gigatonnes of carbon dioxide emitted (CO₂e) per year

Source: author’s calculations based on Harris et al, 2021

The fossil fuel industry also has the Congo Basin in its crosshairs. In 2022, the DRC announced an auction for oil and gas exploration licences, claiming that it may be sitting on up to 16 million barrels of crude oil.

Many of these potential reserves lie within the rainforest. The associated drilling (and resulting destruction) of the Congo Basin has been labelled by environmental experts as a ‘climate bomb’, threatening ‘one of the last and most critical frontiers in the battle against climate breakdown’ (Hess, 2024).

Losing the Congo Basin’s capacity for carbon absorption could bring disastrous consequences in terms of further increases in global temperatures and the wider meteorological and ecological implications of a rapidly warming planet. With the planet’s Amazonian and Asian lungs already wheezing, protecting their African counterpart is critical.

Time is running out. Continuing to cut down the Congo Basin rainforest at current rates would mean extinction for thousands of species of plants and animals, while also puncturing one of the planet’s vital life support machines. The simultaneous destruction of precious biodiversity and critical carbon sequestration capacity would be a crushing blow to the environment.

Life in the basin

Humans have lived in the Congo Basin for tens of thousands of years. Today, the region is home to over 75 million people, including 150 different ethnic groups such as the Ba'Aka, BaMbuti and Efe people.

Although many communities living in the basin are nomadic (moving from place to place in search of food, water and shelter), a large share is native to the DRC – one of the poorest countries in the world.

With a GDP per capita of just $557, around 70% of people in the DRC live on less than $2 per day (World Bank, 2024). This means that about 60 million people live in what would be categorised as ‘extreme poverty’.

Figure 3: GDP per capita, DRC (2015 USD)

Source: World Bank (accessed via the Economics Observatory API)

The situation has got worse over time. In real terms, GDP per capita has fallen since the 1970s (see Figure 3). Much of this can be attributed to longstanding political instability in the region.

Between 1997 and 2003, the DRC faced a bloody civil war, with an estimated six million casualties from fighting, disease and malnutrition, as well as the near collapse of the country’s economy.

Congolese internal tension is itself partly a legacy of the country’s brutal colonial exploitation at the hands of King Leopold II of Belgium. Historians estimate that up to ten million Congolese people died as a direct result of the Belgian occupation between 1908 and 1960.

The country is still struggling today. To compare what life is like in less economically developed countries (LEDCs), policy-makers often turn to measures such as the human development index (HDI) or the human capital index (HCI). The latter ‘quantifies the contribution of health and education to the productivity of the next generation of workers’ (World Bank, 2024).

In HCI terms, the DRC ranks 164^th out of 174 countries, with an index score of just 0.37 (see Figure 4). This means that ‘a Congolese child born today can expect to achieve only 37% of their potential’ compared with what would have been possible with optimal schools and healthcare services (World Bank, 2024).

The wider sub-Saharan African (SSA) region has an average HCI score of 0.4. So, with respect to human capital performance, the DRC is among the poorest of the poor. Similarly, life expectancy in the DRC is just 57 years – 16 years below the global average and 22 years below the United States.

Figure 4: HCI index scores (2020)

Source: World Bank

Growing up

Despite this bleak outlook, the DRC has plenty of economic potential. The Congo Basin is rich in natural resources, holding vast deposits of some of the world’s most valuable commodities, including diamonds, gold and coltan (a vital input for mobile phones, computers and other technologies).

Logging can also contribute to economic growth, if managed carefully. Over the border in the Republic of the Congo, for example, timber exports were worth $260 million, according to the latest data from the World Bank.

The DRC’s coltan deposits provide a neat microcosm for the thorny challenge facing policy-makers today. On the one hand, with an estimated 3.5 million tonnes of cobalt reserves, the DRC could be at the forefront of the global net-zero transition.

Coltan is a vital input for electric vehicle batteries, solar panels and wind turbines. Not only could extracting this metallic ore help countries around the world to decarbonise, but it could also be an effective way to lift millions of Congolese people out of poverty. According to research by the European Union, the DRC is sitting on $24 trillion worth of untapped mineral reserves (Generalised Scheme of Preferences, GSB Hub, 2024). This is eight times the UK’s current GDP.

But on the other hand, clearing land for drilling would mean the further destruction of the Congo Basin and its tropical rainforest. This is not something the choking planet can withstand. Wiping out the world’s last great carbon sink in the name of net zero is a jarring incongruity.

Similarly, the Congo River is itself an untapped source of both energy and wealth. Harnessing its power is another way that the Congolese government could help reduce poverty.

The Grand Inga Dam project is a group of seven proposed hydroelectric power stations set to be built at the Inga Falls in the DRC. The project would generate around 40 gigawatts of renewable energy – more than double the power generated by the Three Gorges Dam in Hubei, China (currently the world’s largest hydroelectric facility). Advocates of the Grand Inga Dam claim that it will improve Africa’s energy security, create jobs and raise household incomes.

But critics point to previous attempts to harness the power of the Congo River. According to a report by the BBC, the first generation of Inga dams (built in the 1970s and 1980s) fell into disrepair after the Congolese government failed to pay the energy company in charge of the project. Just ten years after they were built, ‘both dams were dilapidated due to a lack of funding’ (BBC, 2013).

As with the DRC’s cobalt reserves, the proposed Grand Inga Dam project represents a difficult policy tension. Large-scale renewable energy generation is critical in the fight against climate change, and the dam could bring major economic benefits to the DRC, the Congo Basin region and Africa as a whole. But its construction could also cause substantial ecological and environmental damage.

As part of the project, the Bundi valley would need to be flooded with water and turned into a vast reservoir, potentially displacing up to 30,000 people and wiping out entire habitats. Reconciling the trade-off between the need for green energy and the preservation of the natural world is an issue felt acutely in the Congo Basin. Squaring this particular circle is of paramount importance.

The challenge ahead

The Congo Basin is a precious source of biodiversity and one of our planet’s last functional carbon sinks. Protecting this critical frontier must remain a top priority for policy-makers in the region and beyond.

But this must be balanced against the needs of some of the poorest people in the world. For families living below the extreme poverty line in countries like the DRC, industries such as timber and coltan mining represent a window of economic hope. Lifting people out of poverty, while protecting the natural world, is a daunting but unavoidable challenge.

With careful policy design, the situation need not be completely binary. If projects like the Grand Inga Dam are managed effectively – with environmental and ecological concerns properly considered – the DRC could become a global leader in renewable energy, acting as a ‘green engine room’ for sub-Saharan Africa.

This would not only create wealth, but also reduce the need for fossil fuel extraction in the surrounding area. Similarly, extracting coltan in a way that is sustainable and does not encroach too heavily on the Congo rainforest could generate substantial economic activity, while also providing a critical ingredient for the worldwide push for net zero.

On a wider level, if policy-makers can ‘weave in’ the value of biodiversity into economic decision-making, as advocated in the 2021 Dasgupta Review, places like the Congo Basin may have a more hopeful future.

As Partha Dasgupta concludes in his report, truly sustainable economic growth means ‘rebalancing our demand of Nature’s goods and services with its capacity to supply them’.

From the timber held in the Congo Basin’s trees, to the minerals nested beneath the forest floor, to the awesome potential energy carried by the river’s thousand-mile journey, balancing our growing demands of the natural world with what it can sustainably supply is vital. It is not just future of this rainforest on the line – it is all our futures.