The Congo Basin
The Congo Basin's vast rainforest is home to forest elephants, rare antelopes and gorillas, as well as 3,300 endemic species of plants. This - the second largest rainforest on Earth - provides livelihoods for tens of millions of people and plays an increasing role in the global efforts to halt climate change.
Bonobos - considered to be humankind's closest relatives - were the last of the great apes to be discovered and live exclusively in the Democratic Republic of Congo
The Congo Basin is a vast rainforest straddling the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon.
In the DRC alone, 40 million people - from farmers to fishing communities - depend on the forest for their livelihoods.
The Congo Basin rainforest also has exceptional ecological importance. It is home to forest elephants, gorillas, bonobos, rare antelopes, forest buffalo and a threatened forest giraffid, the okapi. Of the 270 species of mammals discovered there so far, 39 are found nowhere else on Earth - and of its 10,000 plant species, a staggering 3,300 are unique to the region.
This rainforest also plays a vital role in regulating the global climate. Intact forest landscapes - the last remaining large unfragmented areas of natural forests - are the most resilient to climate change and contain the biggest carbon stock of all forests. Eighty per cent of Africa’s intact forest landscapes are in the DRC - the fourth largest forest carbon reservoir of any country on Earth.
Increased international demand for commodities and natural resources has led to large scale industrial logging, which is devastating the rainforest and the people and animals that live there.
But, if development proposals based on rapid industrial expansion into rainforests are allowed to proceed, and the World Bank fails to learn the lessons from Cameroon, things are going to get worse - for the forests, its people, its wildlife and the global climate.
Greenpeace opened an office in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2008, to step up our work for the appropriate protection of the Congo's intact forests, as well as of the rights and livelihood of the indigenous and local peoples depending on them.
A woman from a forest dependent community gathers firewood.
Since then, we have been working on the ground to document and expose the plundering of the Congo basin by international logging firms, and advocating for the stricter regulation of forest concessions and for maintaining the existing moratorium on logging activities.
Our vision is for an end to all deforestation in the Congo by 2015 and by 2020 globally. We believe that, by following an environmentally sound and socially just development model, the DRC can protect its forests, respect the rights of its forest communities and achieve economic development - while helping to protect the global climate.
In 2010, Oscar-winning French actress, Marion Cotillard, travelled with Greenpeace to the heart of the Congo to bear witness to the destruction in a series of video journals. These were her first impressions: