World Resources Institute | By: Molly Bergen | October 24, 2017:
Molly Bergen recently traveled to three countries to document field activities of the Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE), a U.S. government-funded conservation program implemented by a coalition of NGOs, including WRI.
After several hours of bouncing up the Congo River in a motorboat, as my travel companions and I pulled into the muddy bank of a dilapidated military checkpoint—some crumbling colonial-era buildings, a lone solar panel, rows of bamboo huts—our small skiff was dwarfed by the only other motorized vessel we’d see that day.
Belching black smoke into the humid air, the barge looked like it had been cobbled together out of spare pieces of wood and scrap metal. On the top deck, a cluster of women pounded manioc in buckets next to a smoking stove. Below deck, a girl trailed a cup on a long string in the coffee-colored river below. In between, the barge was stuffed to the gills with white plastic sacks packed full of the fuel that powers much of modern Democratic Republic of Congo: charcoal.
The DRC’s charcoal trade is intertwined with many of the forces shaping the lives of its 83 million citizens: tradition, opportunity, destruction, violence. To protect the country’s forest and improve the lives of those who depend on it, reforming the charcoal industry is essential.
Forest Power
More than 2.5 billion people worldwide depend on biomass (which includes charcoal, fuelwood and animal dung) for cooking every day. In the DRC, an estimated 90 percent of people rely on fuelwood and charcoal. Why? Simply put, it’s the result of limited energy infrastructure (only 9 percent of people in the country have electricity) and an abundance of forests.
The Western Europe-sized country contains the bulk of the Earth’s second-largest intact tropical forest (after the Amazon). So far, deforestation here has been lower than rainforests in the Amazon or Indonesia; in 2000, 61 percent of the DRC was still covered in intact primary forest. However, between 2000 and 2010, more than 10,000 square kilometers (almost 4,000 square miles) of tree cover were lost—an area larger than Puerto Rico.
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