Democratic Republic of the Congo’s government is preparing to auction off a series of licenses to drill for oil in the Congo basin. This threatens to damage around 11 million hectares of the world’s second largest rainforest.
But it is not just trees that might be lost in the search for oil. Our new study, published in Nature Geoscience, shows at least three of 16 proposed oil licences planned for sale on July 28 2022 overlap with sensitive peat swamp forests, which store even more carbon below ground in their soils than is held by the trees above.
