Africa's great forest stores three years of global emissions
Second only to the Amazon, Congolian rainforests cloak more than two million square kilometres across Central Africa—about a quarter of remaining tropical forest worldwide. Peat swamps along the Congo alone lock roughly twenty-nine billion tonnes of carbon, near three years of planetary greenhouse gases.
Lowland moist broadleaf forest fills the Congo River basin and its tributaries. Flora and fauna counts exceed ten thousand plant species and ten thousand animal species; some estimates credit the region with more than a quarter of Earth's plant species. Six WWF ecoregions parse the belt, from Atlantic Equatorial coastal forests to northeastern and northwestern lowlands, central lowlands, and eastern swamp forests.
Edges matter as much as core. North, south, and southwest, woodland grades into drier forest–savanna mosaic. Westward, Congolian stands meet Lower Guinean coastal forests running into Nigeria and Benin—sometimes bundled as Lower Guinean–Congolian forests. Eastward, lowlands rise into Albertine Rift montane forests along a branch of the East African Rift. That gradient shelters different communities while still exchanging species across a continuous humid belt.
The central basin's peat swamp forests, lining the river and its tributaries, rank among the largest tropical peatlands anywhere. About 30 percent of the more than 10,000 plant species are endemic, and although the forest is less diverse than the Amazon or Southeast Asia, it is still richer than most of Africa. Over 400 mammal species live here, among them forest and bush elephants, leopards, bongos, bonobos, chimpanzees and gorillas, while the okapi occurs only in the northeast. Around 1,000 bird species, including the grey parrot and bat hawk, share the forest with some 700 kinds of fish. Commercial logging, oil palm plantations and mining fragment the canopy, and the bushmeat trade and poaching strip out wildlife.
Source: Congolian rainforests
