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

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

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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.

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