Africa’s rainforests could be worth billions if preserved.

Hiking in a hushed forest reserve near northern Mozambique, the startling thwack! of an axe splintering a tree shattered the soothing atmospherics. During the next two hours, two dozen men pedaled out of the enclave toward city dwellers on ancient, wobbly bicycles stacked precariously with wood, perhaps 2 tons of purloined forest in all.

The stealthy cyclists – some with permits to haul away deadwood, making their work seem perfectly legal – had pulled off a global warming heist in broad daylight.

Saving African forests like this one and the greatest of all thickets, the dense Congo Basin rainforest at the heart of the continent, is becoming vital to global carbon capture. With the Amazon rainforest shrinking as cattle ranches, soybean farms and logging expand, the Congo Basin may soon become the world’s essential carbon sink, “a crucial planetary buffer,” in the words of the World Economic Forum. International investment could shore up that climate defense.

“A central focus of the continent’s agenda is equitable climate finance,” said the Ethiopia-based United Nations Economic Commission for Africa before the UN climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan in 2024. “Many African nations spend more on servicing debt than on healthcare or education. Leaders are calling for financial reforms to make funding accessible, affordable and timely.” 

Scientists blame carbon and methane for most of the effects of global warming – manifest in our lives as more intense and destructive storms, deeper droughts, shifting rainfall patterns, extreme heat and melting glaciers and ice caps. Africa – with far fewer vehicles, airliners and factories emitting greenhouse gases than the rest of the world – is getting hit hard: in 2024, Mali received its heaviest rainfall in almost six decades, and across the usually arid Sahel region floods killed more than 1,500 people and displaced 1.2 million.  

Dominated by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), three times the size of Texas, the Congo Basin absorbs 600 million tons more carbon dioxide than it emits each year. That surplus on nature’s balance sheet equals one-third of the emissions from transport in the United States. Protecting the basin could yield billions of dollars for several African countries, experts say. Scientists monitor changes in the rainforest canopy in the DRC from the CongoFlux tower in the Yangambi Biosphere Reserve near the Congo River (picture, by Axel Fassio/CIFOR). The 180-foot tower measures the exchange of greenhouse gases between the atmosphere and the forest ecosystem, helping to assess the carbon sink potential in the Congo Basin, according to the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

Congo Basin Corridor

In early 2025, the DRC’s parliament passed legislation that would set aside an area as large as France for climate friendly ambitions. The Kivu-Kinshasa Green Corridor would combine conservation, renewable energy and so-called sustainable farming in a green economy belt connecting the conflict-prone east with the busy capital about 1,500 miles away. The jobs created could help draw young people away from fighting that has re-ignited in the eastern, mineral-rich Kivu region near Rwanda.

A report from UNECA and the Congo Basin Climate Commission said that “current greenhouse gas projects in the countries covered by the Congo Basin Blue Fund represent a lucrative international business model that involves successfully selling carbon credits in the international carbon markets.”

Central Africa’s position is “extremely advantageous,” according to the Congo commission, because the cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming impacts is USD 5 to 8 per ton of carbon dioxide versus up to USD 200 in Europe and as much as USD 300 in Japan. Preserving a forest is far cheaper than trying to create one.

Yet the route to these imagined riches could be jarring. The African Union commissioner on rural development and a sustainable environment has warned “that carbon markets growth does not necessarily guarantee nature-positive, climate positive or equitable outcomes.” Ambassador Josefa Leonel Correia Sacko, an Angolan economist, said “frontline communities” face a lack of market information, consultation, legal advice and fair compensation.

“The pressure to quickly open new markets often has meant that the markets are operating without adequate legal frameworks, grievance mechanisms or accountability for rights violations,” Sacko said.

As the climate clock ticks, international investment so far is scant, and harm is mounting. While largely intact, the Congo Basin shows “a clearly growing trend of deforestation and degradation” since 2015, said CIFOR. Forest preservation could contribute 30 percent of carbon emission reductions, yet this approach receives only 3 percent of global climate finance, according to Conservation International, a U.S.-based environmental group.

The Blue Fund involves 17 countries including Kenya and Tanzania and aims to produce 300 million carbon credits a year. One carbon credit equals a 1 metric ton reduction in emissions, verified by accredited, independent auditors, who may visit a site to check on a carbon project’s performance. Once verified, the credit is documented in a carbon registry and issued. The Congo commission says an expanded African carbon market requires harmonized standards across participating countries. (While most attention falls on the DRC, the second largest forest cover in the basin initiative is in Angola.)

Assuming competitive international markets, an average price of almost USD 50 per ton of carbon is attainable – not enough for advanced economies, but a windfall for Africa. Among buyers that might soon line up for African credits: international aviation. CORSIA, the International Civil Aviation Organization’s carbon-reduction program, shifts from voluntary to mandatory in 2027 for airlines from most countries.

“The states of the Congo River Basin provide an extremely valuable service to the world,” UNECA and the Congo Basin commission note. “If those countries are not rewarded for that service, they may have little incentive to maintain it.”

EU Deforestation Regulation

Complicating that goal is the European Union’s deforestation supply chain regulation, which formally kicks in at the end of 2025 for medium-size and large companies and six months later in mid-2026 for smaller enterprises. The measure bars importation of goods including wood, cocoa, coffee, rubber and palm oil – and cattle-derived items such as leather – produced on deforested land since Dec. 31, 2020.

The crackdown came after an investigation by Global Witness, an environmental watchdog group, found that banks based in the EU had supplied 7 billion euros to agribusinesses linked to deforestation in the Amazon and Congo Basin.

EU regulators will require the geolocation and date of production of products to verify they aren’t linked to human or natural loss of forests. The EU is easing up on the due-diligence requirements for smaller companies farther down the value chain.

“This is very challenging because in Congo Basin a lot of the commodities are from smallholder farmers,” said Sharon Gomez of Munich-based GAF, a geospatial land monitoring company, at a climate-summit briefing. Gomez and her colleagues are working with the European Space Agency to come up with tree-cover density monitoring and “near real-time forest disturbance” analysis to comply with the new regulations, based on satellite remote-sensing data.

Dejene Dadi, head of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union in central Ethiopia, Africa’s largest coffee-growing nation, told The New York Times that his member farmers need more support for mapping and training to meet the European deadline.

Meanwhile, African forests stand ready to put more money into African pockets as a thriving ecosystem. A flight from East Africa to the west takes you over the unbroken green canopy of the Congo Basin rainforest, a reminder of how valuable this global treasure is today – and may be tomorrow.