Lush, old-growth rainforest covers 65% of Rosalie Matondo’s country — nearly double the share of wooded land in the United States or European Union — and conservationists hail it forBut the Republic of the Congo’s gains are in danger, Matondo warns, if the majority of Central African nation’s 6 million residents keep getting poorer.
“We cannot be telling the population that is poor that they should do their best to preserve biodiversity,” Matondo said. “We have to see our population not being poor, so we can try to tell them, ’OK, since you’re not poor and you have the means to survive, now you can preserve the diversity.” kept the vast majority of its forests intact, Irfaan Ali accused the BBC presenter Stephen Sackur of “hypocrisy” in attempting to “lecture us on climate change.”“I’m going to lecture you on climate change. Because we have kept this forest alive that you enjoy that the world enjoys, that you don’t pay us for, that you don’t value,” Irfaan Ali said. “Guess what? We have the lowest deforestation rate in the world.
Capturing this gas and using it as fuel, rather than just burning it off as a byproduct of oil extraction, might be less wasteful in the long-term, proponents of the country’s LNG push argue.its project’s “zero flaring technological approach” in the country is in line with the oil giant’s plan to cut back on planet-heating emissions.
“The problem with that is you can’t use wind and solar for a lot of things,” said Ramachandran, who previously worked at the World Bank and now leads energy development research at the California-based Breakthrough Institute think tank.The U.S. has heavily invested in drilling and exporting its own gas and oil, enough to leapfrog Saudi Arabia and Russia in production
Liberia offers another example Matondo said she might follow. Last year, the government in Monrovia agreed to sell 10% of the West African country’s land to a Dubai-based company looking to preserve the forests as a way to offset emissions from the United Arab Emirates’ oil and gas sales.