Brazzaville Summit of the Three Basins needs to find ways to protect world’s tropical forests

Subject: Environment

Section: International conventions

Context:

The Three Basins Threat Report: Fossil Fuel, Mining, and Industrial Expansion Threats to Forests and Communities, published by Earth Insight and other non-profits, documents the challenges that the world’s remaining tropical forest basins face.

Summit of three basins:

The first Summit of the Three Tropical Forest Basins was held in Brazzaville in 2011 and resulted in the Declaration of the Summit of the Three Tropical Forest Basins, which recognised the need to establish a platform to promote cooperation among the countries of the three basins.
A Summit of Three basins is going to be held at Brazzaville, Republic of Congo.
Aim: To strengthen South-South governance for three ecosystems — Amazon, Congo, Borneo-Mekong and Southeast Asia.
Large parts of tropical forests in these areas remain threatened by fossil fuel, mining and extractive industry expansion.
These basins are moving towards a systemic ecosystem breakdown that affects global climate stability, biodiversity and the livelihoods of millions of indigenous peoples and local communities.

Threat from oil and gas extraction in these ecosystems:

In Indonesia, half of all nickel concessions overlap with natural forests.
In the Amazon basin, nearly 13 percent of undisturbed tropical forests overlap with existing or planned oil and gas blocks and more than 33 percent overlap with active and inactive mining concessions.
In the Congo basin, more than 39 per cent of undisturbed Tropical Moist Forests overlap with oil and gas blocks and nearly 27 percent overlap with mining concessions. It is a threat to the Indigenous pygmy and other rare and threatened peoples.
In Southeast Asia, nearly 20 percent of undisturbed Tropical Moist Forests are in oil and gas blocks designated for production or exploration.

Source: DownToEarth