The area of land given over to oil and gas extraction in Africa is set to quadruple, threatening to wipe out a third of the dense tropical forests in the Congo basin and accelerate the climate breakdown, a report warns.
Almost 10% of the African continent is already covered by oil and gas production fields, but this could expand to almost 38% if proposals for new projects get the go-ahead – unleashing a huge carbon bomb into the atmosphere that would severely undermine global climate action, according to mapping and analysis by Rainforest Foundation UK and Earth Insight.
Fossil fuel extraction, deforestation and human rights violations often go hand in hand, and in Africa 30% of oil and gas fields overlap with forests that sustain tens of millions of people, and store water and capture carbon that helps neutralise human-made greenhouse gas emissions.
Read the story in The Guardian