Protecting forests in Africa

Main image: Evergreen cloud forest on the slopes of Mt Rwenzori, the third-highest mountain in Africa. The summit is at the borderline between Uganda and the DR Congo.

Groundbreaking new research warns that Africa’s forests, once vital allies in the fight against climate change, have turned from a carbon sink into a carbon source.

A new international study published in Scientific Reports and led by researchers at the National Centre for Earth Observation at the Universities of Leicester, Sheffield and Edinburgh reveals that Africa’s forests, which have long absorbed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, are now releasing more carbon than they remove.

This alarming shift, which happened after 2010, underscores the urgent need for stronger global action to protect forests, a major focus of the COP30 Climate Summit in Brazil, which concluded on 21 November.

‘A critical wake-up call’

Using advanced satellite data and machine learning, the researchers tracked more than a decade of changes in aboveground forest biomass – the amount of carbon stored in trees and woody vegetation.

They found that while Africa gained carbon between 2007 and 2010, widespread forest loss in tropical rainforests has since tipped the balance.

Between 2010 and 2017, the continent lost approximately 106 billion kilograms of forest biomass per year. That is equivalent to the weight of about 106 million cars.

The losses are concentrated in tropical moist broadleaf forests in countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar and parts of West Africa, driven by deforestation and forest degradation. Gains in savanna regions due to shrub growth have not been enough to offset the losses.

‘This is a critical wake-up call for global climate policy. If Africa’s forests are no longer absorbing carbon, it means other regions and the world as a whole will need to cut greenhouse gas emissions even more deeply to stay within the 2°C goal of the Paris Agreement and avoid catastrophic climate change. Climate finance for the Tropical Forests Forever Facility must be scaled up quickly to put an end to global deforestation for good.’

PROFESSOR HEIKO BALZTER
Senior author and director of the Institute for Environmental Futures at the University of Leicester

Reversing the damage

The research draws on data from NASA’s spaceborne laser instrument, called GEDI, and Japan’s ALOS radar satellites, combined with machine learning and thousands of on-the-ground forest measurements.

The result is the most detailed map to date of biomass changes across the African continent, covering a decade, at a resolution fine enough to capture local deforestation patterns.