Carbon & Climate Change
Go Conscious Earth is a global nonprofit working with local and indigenous communities in the Congo Basin Rainforest to halt deforestation, a leading cause of climate change.
Alongside the Amazon, the Congo Basin Rainforest is the second largest carbon reserve in the world.
The vast amounts of water and energy exchanged between tropical forests and the earth's atmosphere are critical to controlling local, regional, and global climates. Tropical rainforests worldwide help regulate rainfall patterns by recycling moisture through the atmosphere and keeping surface temperatures lower than in non-forested areas.
Carbon stored in the DRC's portion of the Basin exists in a matrix of both living, aboveground forest vegetation and partially decomposed belowground vegetable matter, in the form of peat. Peatlands are intensely carbon-rich areas that cover a mere three percent of the Earth’s surface, yet store one-third of the world’s soil carbon. The DRC boasts over half of the world’s largest below ground carbon stock, stored in the vitally important Cuvette Central Peatland Complex. Cuvette is a world jewel, containing 30 percent of the world's tropical carbon, and holding soil stocks equivalent to the aboveground vegetation of the entire Congo Basin Rainforest spanning six African nations!
Accumulated over 10,600 years, Cuvette stores 33 billion tonnes of carbon - an amount equivalent to twenty years of U.S. fossil fuel emissions! And while the DRC's aboveground forests safely store 24 billion tonnes of carbon locked in it's vegetation, this would amount to 88 billion tonnes released into the atmosphere if the forests are cut or destroyed.
“The generation that destroys the environment is not the generation that pays the price.”
― Wangari Maathai
Go Conscious Earth works for long-term maintenance of carbon storing rainforests and peat bogs essential to global climate stability. We do this by supporting ancestral land rights initiatives, sustainable livelihoods, poverty alleviation and health improvements, and conservation efforts led by forest-dependent communities.
