Floating cities of logs: can the ‘lungs of Africa’ survive its exploitation? | Democratic Republic of the Congo
“YesYou can’t be afraid of storms,” says Jean de Dieu Mokuma as the sun sets over the Congo River behind him. “With the current, once the journey begins, there is no turning back.” Mokuma, accompanied by his wife Marie-Thérèse and their two young children, pilots a cargo of wood downstream, moored to a precarious raft and attached to a canoe.
They are stranded overnight outside the chaotic trading town of Mbandaka, where port officials have removed components from Mokuma’s outboard motor to ensure dubiously legal taxes will be paid. If the family overcomes corruption and river currents and arrives with their raft intact, they will earn $300 (£220) by selling the wood to a sawmill in Kinshasa.
“I would stay a fisherman,” says Mokuma. “But there is no way to earn money. In Kinshasa, I can earn what we need to survive.”
Mokuma is one of millions of people who depend on the waters and resources of the Congo River Basin to survive. Stretching from the Albertine Rift Mountains to the Atlantic coast, the 4,700 km long river and its tributaries span six nations, feeding vast networks of rainforests and wetlands.
The Congo Basin is the second largest rainforest on the planet and traps 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon emissions per year. It is also one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet and includes more than 10,000 species of plants, more than 400 species of mammals, 1,000 species of birds and 700 species of fish.
More than half of its forests are in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where these ecosystems are vulnerable to pressures from a rapidly growing population and poorly regulated land use.
Erick Bayo is a forest ranger at the Bombo-Lumene nature reserve, a protected area which, he says, contains 1,000 hectares (2,500 acres) of the last remaining intact forests around Kinshasa. Venturing into the reserve’s valleys with Bayo and a squad of ragged Congolese army soldiers, we discover clearings of felled trees and stretches of ashen earth blackened by illegal charcoal production. Hundreds of bags ready to be transported were found abandoned next to the furnace pits.
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Aerial views show the Lumene River, home to some of the last primary forests in the region around the city of Kinshasa, and areas deforested for charcoal production in the Bombo-Lumene reserve.
“There was fighting here, so the community fled,” says Bayo. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have left their charcoal. » The patrol set about destroying the abandoned stocks – exhausting work in the midday sun. Kinshasa, with a population of more than 18 million and growing, is a city with an inexhaustible demand for charcoal, a cheap alternative to electricity for the 75 percent of the Congolese population who survive on less than $2.15 a day.
The discovery in recent years of a vast peatland beneath the swamp forests of the Congo Basin has reinforced the need to protect the region. In the DRC and its neighbor the Republic of Congo, on the west bank of the river, these peatlands, known as the Cuvette Centrale, contain 30 billion tonnes of trapped carbon.
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Farmers make their way through the dense, lush swamp forest around the village of Lokolama, part of a network containing the world’s largest tropical peatland.
The village of Lokolama, in the DRC’s Équateur province, sits in the middle of this ecosystem, which was extensively mapped in 2017 by British researchers. The Cuvette Centrale has drawn global attention to a controversial plan by the DRC government to auction oil and gas drilling rights in the basin region.
With the auctions canceled in 2024, a large part of peatlands still lies outside legally protected areas.
“It was new for us to discover the word peat bog and to learn that our land allows us all to breathe pure oxygen,” explains Jean-Pierre Ahetoa, the village chief of Lokolama. “We always hunted antelopes in the forest and searched for honey.” The village has an informal approach to conservation in the absence of legal advice. “We know how to divide the land, we left part of it for fields and construction, but we leave the rest intact,” he says.
From the banks of the river near Lokolama, observing traffic on the Congo clearly shows the challenge of conserving this vital resource.
Vast barges, containing hundreds of logs, move downstream. The ships look like floating cities. Traders and boat crews camp for days and weeks, buying rations and cooking charcoal from riverside communities who paddle their canoes down the river to barter.
Upon arrival at the port of Kinkole, outside Kinshasa, where the vast river narrows into a series of impassable rapids, workers rush into the water to hitch logs to tractors. Traders dressed in colorful robes carefully monitor the melee as they select which cargo to purchase. These supply chains are opaque, with recent research suggesting that most logging concessions in the DRC operate illegally.
Between 2001 and 2024, the DRC lost 21 million hectares (52 million acres) of trees; the future of the “lungs of Africa” depends on the capacity of conservation to overcome this exploitation.
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A barge carrying hundreds of logs descends towards Kinshasa. People, including traders, also use rafts and log boats to travel along the Congo River, camping among goods for days or even weeks.
