Oil and gas permit sales cast shadow over rainforest

The forest will never end," said Papa Mbembe as he trekked through the swampy peatland of the rainforest behind his village in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), nearly 650km from the capital, Kinshasa.

- Cassie Dummett

As he walked barefoot through the rainforest, he pointed to the ferns, lianas and hardwood trees rising into the canopy. He hunts small antelope, collects timber for his house and is an expert in traditional medicine.

He scraped the bark of a boala tree (Pentaclethra macrophylla) with his machete and collected the powder in a large leaf, explaining how he boils this up with other leaves and roots to treat stomach ache. "I have lived all my life in the forest; everything I do is in the forest," he said. "The forest provides my food and my medicine." But beneath his feet lay something even more precious: dense layers of peat formed over millennia creating a carbon store that holds the equivalent of three years of global fossil fuel emissions.

Now this forest is under threat from plans to exploit other natural resources. The DRC government is creating new logging concessions and also selling permits for oil and gas exploration. As well as the peatlands in the north-west of the DRC, the drilling permits cover Virunga national Park in the east of the country, home to mountain gorillas and the critically endangered lowland gorilla.

The auction has raised concerns about the future of a forest protection deal signed by former British prime minister Boris Johnson, on behalf of the Central African Forest Initiative, and the DRC president, Félix Tshisekedi, at Cop26.

Papa Mbembe's village is a line of mud-and-thatch houses strung along a riverbank, shaded by trees. The only way to get there is by boat along the Ruki River and, for a villager without an outboard motor, it takes 24 hours to reach the nearest town.