Page 28 - Governing Congo Basin Forests in a Changing Climate • Olufunso Somorin
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Chapter 1
Figure 1-2: Map of the Congo Basin (Source: World Resources Institute, 2007)
carbon - between 25 and 30 billion tons of carbon in its vegetation alone (Hoare, 2007; Brown et al., 2011), with the forests of DRC storing more than half of this carbon. This carbon reserve is of global significance in regulating greenhouse gas emissions (Zhang and Justice, 2001). More recently, renewed global attention is gradually shifting from the importance of tropical forests beyond the provisioning functions in terms of tangible goods they provide, to the regulative functions through the intangible ecosystem services they supply, especially for carbon and biodiversity (Costanza et al., 1997; Ndoye and Tieguhong, 2002; World Bank, 2004; WRI, 2005).
Over the past decades, tropical deforestation (conversion of forest to other land uses) has dramatically increased, even though global deforestation has reduced from 16 million hectares per year for 1990-2000 to about 13 million hectares per
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