The Congo Basin: Africa’s Lungs Under Siege
The Congo Basin is often called the lungs of Africa — a rainforest so vast it helps the planet breathe. Stretching across six nations and covering more than 200 million hectares, it absorbs over a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, regulating rainfall across the continent and anchoring global climate stability.
Yet these forests are being destroyed by the same forces that have long plundered the region’s minerals: profit, imperial power and a colonial imagination that treats Africa as a warehouse of resources rather than a home of living communities.
This is not merely a story about trees. It is a story about who decides the fate of the planet’s last frontiers — and who bears the cost of their destruction.
The New Scramble for the Forest
From Kinshasa to Brazzaville to Yaoundé, governments are auctioning off logging concessions, oil blocks and “sustainable development” projects that carve deep scars into one of Earth’s most vital ecosystems.
French logging giants, Chinese mining firms and Western-backed agribusinesses are all vying for control. Roads and rail lines slice through once-intact forest corridors. Palm oil plantations expand under the banner of “green growth”. Even the World Bank and IMF promote timber exports as a path to “poverty reduction”.
It is, in truth, a new Scramble for Africa — only now the spoils are measured in hectares of rainforest and tonnes of carbon, not rubber and ivory. The same imperial logic that once divided the Congo River Basin at the Berlin Conference now divides it through trade deals, concessions and carbon markets.
The Mirage of “Sustainable Logging”
Western governments and corporations often insist that “sustainable forestry” and “offset programmes” will protect the Congo Basin. In reality, these mechanisms entrench exploitation under a veneer of environmental responsibility.
Carbon credit schemes such as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) allow polluters in the Global North to continue emitting greenhouse gases while claiming to “offset” their pollution by paying for forest conservation in the South.
In practice, this means climate finance replaces colonial tribute: money flows northward in the form of credits, while local communities lose access to the land they have cared for over generations. Forests become commodities, not commons. The atmosphere becomes a marketplace, not a shared inheritance.
“The mechanical mind of mastery and control is at the root of the ecological crisis including climate change.” — Nnimmo Bassey, Nigerian environmentalist
Human Cost: Dispossession and Resistance
For Indigenous peoples of the Congo Basin — the Baka, Batwa and many others — the forest is life. It is their medicine cabinet, their school, their temple. Yet in the name of conservation and carbon trading, entire communities are evicted from ancestral lands.
“Protected areas” and logging concessions alike often come with military enforcement. Armed guards patrol lands once open to hunting and gathering. Those who resist are criminalised as “poachers”. Those who protest risk imprisonment or worse.
Despite this violence, resistance endures. Women lead forest defence movements; youth networks document illegal logging; Indigenous groups demand recognition of customary land rights. Across the Basin, ordinary people are asserting a radical truth: that living with the forest is not backwardness — it is wisdom.
Ecocide and Global Consequences
Scientists warn that the Congo Basin could flip from a carbon sink to a carbon source within decades if deforestation and degradation continue. Already, certain regions emit more carbon than they absorb. The forest canopy is thinning. The soil, once rich and stable, erodes into rivers.
This ecological unravelling does not stop at Africa’s borders. The Basin influences rainfall patterns as far away as the Sahel and the Horn of Africa. Its collapse would accelerate droughts, floods and food insecurity across the continent — and destabilise the global climate system.
To destroy the Congo Basin is not simply to lose biodiversity. It is to dismantle one of the Earth’s last living climate regulators — a planetary lung collapsing under the weight of capital.
The Politics of False Solutions
Global North governments congratulate themselves for funding “forest protection” programmes — but the fine print tells another story. Conservation is outsourced to Western NGOs. Profits are privatised, while decision-making remains in foreign hands. Local knowledge is ignored; local sovereignty is denied.
The climate movement in the North often repeats this pattern: demanding emission cuts at home while remaining silent about the corporate pillage of the Global South. This selective environmentalism treats African land as a carbon sponge, not as territory inhabited by people with political rights.
True climate justice requires more than technological fixes or carbon markets. It demands a redistribution of power — political, economic and ecological.
Toward Climate Sovereignty
To protect the Congo Basin is to challenge the system that endangers it. That means recognising the right of forest peoples to govern their land. It means rejecting extractive “green growth” models. It means reparative climate finance — not charity, but justice.
A genuinely eco-socialist approach would:
- Return control of forests to Indigenous and local communities through legal recognition of collective land rights.
- End export dependency by building sustainable, locally rooted economies.
- Hold corporations accountable through international law and supply-chain transparency.
- Demand degrowth in the Global North, where overconsumption drives destruction elsewhere.
Protecting the Congo Basin is not an act of altruism. It is an act of planetary self-defence.
Closing: The Pulse of the Planet
The forest breathes for all life. Its rivers carry the memory of millions of years. Its canopy shelters more life than we can imagine. Yet it is being silenced by chainsaws, pipelines and profit.
If we allow the Basin to die, we will have allowed a part of ourselves to die with it.
“In nature’s economy the currency is not money, it is life.” — Vandana Shiva
The fate of the Congo Basin is not a regional concern — it is the moral and ecological question of our time. Will humanity continue to consume the planet’s lungs, or will we finally learn to breathe in solidarity?
— In solidarity with the peoples of the Congo Basin and all who defend life on Earth.