ABIDJAN — Environment ministers from across Africa are meeting in Côte d’Ivoire this week to discuss urgent challenges and strengthen ambition and action against land degradation, desertification and climate change on the continent. The theme of the 10th special session of the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN) is “Raising Africa’s ambition to reduce land degradation, desertification, and drought,” and comes amid an alarming context. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, around 65% of productive land in Africa — 45% of the continent’s total area — is currently degraded, affecting more than 400 million people. Workers digging a pond to store water in the drought-affected Oromia Region of Ethiopia in 2012. Image by UNDP Ethiopia via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), subsistence agriculture is a leading cause of forest loss. Image by Axel Fassio/CIFOR via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). The Sahel and the Congo Basin at the heart of concerns The situation is particularly worrying in regions like the Sahel and the Congo Basin, the world’s second-largest rainforest. The Congo Basin’s 300 million hectares (740 million acres) of forest account for 70% of Africa’s forest cover. These forests play a crucial role in carbon storage, storing a quarter of the world’s terrestrial carbon stock, around 29 billion metric tons of the greenhouse gas. If deforestation here continues at its current rate, projections suggest that 27% of the basin’s remaining undisturbed forests will be lost by 2050. In 2023,…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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