In a report published by WWF‘s Central African regional office (CARPO), the environmental group said the Congo Basin loses 3.7 million acres a year to logging, agriculture, road development and oil exploitation.
“Tropical forest is vanishing at 5% a decade, wrecking habitats and releasing three billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, which is a fifth of global greenhouse emissions,” said CARPO director Laurent Som.
The report said the region was “blanketed by a patchwork quilt” of logging concessions, and that, while the logging itself did little damage, associated roads, infrastructure and migration degraded surrounding landscape and resulted in massive wildlife depletion.
Dutch timber company Wijma became the first firm in the region to operate a certified concession, covering 45,000 acres. WWF is looking for 300,000 more acres to be certified in the Republic of Congo in the months ahead. In April, the Kabo concession, managed by Congolaise Industrielle des Bois, part of the DLH/tt-timber Group, became the first area of Forest Stewardship Council-certified forest in the Congo Basin.
