The rainforest the world forgot: the Congo basin is the second largest on Earth, so why is it being neglected?

Rainforest in Loango national park, Gabon, in the Congo basin: home to about 130 million people, the basin is often called the ‘lungs of Africa’. Photograph: Lee Dalton/Alamy

In October 2023, leaders, scientists and policymakers from three of the world’s great rainforest regions – the Amazon, the Congo, and the Borneo-Mekong basins – assembled in Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of Congo. They were there to discuss one urgent question: how to save the planet’s last great tropical forests from accelerating destruction.

For those present, the question was existential. But to their dismay, almost no one noticed. “There was very little acknowledgment that this was happening, outside of the Congo basin region,” says Prof Simon Lewis, a lecturer at the University of Leeds and University College London, and co-chair of the Congo Basin Science Initiative (CBSI).