REDD in the Congo Basin

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The forest of the Congo Basin expands over an area of continuous tropical rainforest cover only second to that of the Amazon forest. The region’s forests are found in Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and the Central African Republic.

Those forests are currently receiving a lot of attention within the Climate Change negotiations, because they store enormous amounts of carbon, that might be released to the atmosphere if they were to disappear, thus further contributing to climate change. As a result, they are being geared towards their inclusion in a scheme called “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD)”, which would imply payments for “carbon credits” resulting from having reduced carbon emissions.

Though extremely difficult to prove and quantify, the idea is that countries should be financially compensated for avoiding a certain level of deforestation or forest degradation that would have occurred in a business as usual scenario. Compensation would be based in the avoided carbon emissions resulting from forest conservation. Those “avoided emissions” would be traded in the international market and paid for by governments or companies as “offsets” for
their own carbon emissions.