Tal Harris is Greenpeace Africa’s International Communications Coordinator. He submitted this Guest Post about the fires in the Amazon, and in the Congo Basin.
Category: Congo Basin region

The Brazzaville Declaration: Words not action on peatland protection in the Congo Basin. And the strange case of the Congo Basin Blue Fund and the Brazzaville Foundation
Last week, the third meeting of the Partners of the Global Peatlands Initiative took place in Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of Congo. After the meeting, the United Nations Environment Programme, one of the organisers and funder of the meeting, put out a press release announcing that a “historic agreement” had been signed “to protect…

WWF scandal (part 8): WWF and the loggers in the Congo Basin
“For WWF, partnering with Indigenous Peoples is an essential part of our conservation work.” This sentence comes from WWF’s latest newsletter from its international forest and climate team. The article is written by Jolly Sassa Kiuka and Flory Botamba who work for WWF in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Conservation efforts in the Congo Basin are “mostly failing” says new Rainforest Foundation UK report
“Conservation efforts in the Congo Basin are mostly failing to protect forests and biodiversity, having serious negative impacts on local populations, and for these reasons are probably unsustainable.”
The REDD contradiction: Deforestation and oil palm plantations in the Congo Basin
Since 2009, companies have announced new oil palm plantation projects in the Congo Basin covering a total area of 1.6 million hectares. Projects currently underway cover 500,000 hectares. A new report by Rainforest Foundation UK warns that vast areas of the Congo Basin forests are potentially threatened by the expansion of oil palm plantations.