Congo Basin Nature Nonprofits

The Congo is the second-largest rainforest on Earth and the least known, the least visited, and the least funded. It holds forest elephants, gorillas, bonobos, and okapi, and it absorbs more carbon per hectare than the Amazon. Beneath the forest of the central basin lie the Cuvette Centrale peatlands, discovered only recently to be the largest tropical peat complex in the world, holding carbon equivalent to several years of global emissions in waterlogged ground that has been accumulating for ten thousand years.

The forest is still largely standing, which makes this the great opportunity rather than the great tragedy: the chance to protect something before it is lost rather than after. The pressures, logging, mining, oil exploration in the peatlands themselves, and the bushmeat trade, are real and rising.

The organizations here defend the peatlands from drainage and drilling, protect the great apes and forest elephants, and work with communities in countries where governance is difficult and resources are thin. The Congo is arguably the highest-leverage forest on the planet and receives a small fraction of the attention the Amazon does.