Congo Basin Deforestation Risks Water Conflicts Across Africa, Scientist Warns
A conservation scientist with four decades in Central Africa argues that the degradation of the world's second-largest tropical forest could remove a critical continental water regulator, creating...
Lee White, a British-born conservation scientist who served as Gabon's Minister of Forests, Oceans, Environment, and Climate Change until 2023, has warned that continued loss of the Congo Basin forest could destabilize freshwater availability across the African continent and raise the risk of water-based conflict between nations. White made the comments in an interview published September 9, 2026, by Daily Maverick.
The Congo Basin is the second-largest tropical rainforest on Earth, covering approximately 3.3 million square kilometers across six countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon, according to the World Wildlife Fund. The basin holds roughly 8 percent of the world's remaining forest carbon stock.
White's concern centers on the forest's function as a moisture recycler. Tropical forests release water vapor through a process called evapotranspiration, which feeds rainfall systems that extend well beyond the forest's borders. Research published in the journal Nature in 2019 found that forest loss in the Congo Basin reduces rainfall in parts of East and West Africa by measurable margins, affecting agricultural zones hundreds of kilometers from the forest itself.
In his remarks, White described four decades of work building Gabon's national park network, which now covers roughly 11 percent of the country's land area. Gabon established 13 national parks in 2002, a policy White was involved in developing. He also cited what he characterized as the structural failure of global carbon credit markets to deliver adequate financial incentives for forest protection to governments in the region.
Carbon markets have long been proposed as a mechanism for compensating tropical forest nations for conserving trees rather than logging them. The Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation program, known as REDD+, was established under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to facilitate such payments. Critics, including a 2023 investigation by The Guardian and other outlets, found that a significant share of certified carbon credits from tropical forests did not represent verifiable emissions reductions, undermining confidence in the mechanism.
White's warning about water conflict comes in a regional context already marked by disputes over river systems. The Nile Basin has been the site of a prolonged diplomatic standoff between Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which Ethiopia began filling in 2020. The dispute, which remains unresolved as of this reporting, illustrates how freshwater allocation can become a source of sustained interstate tension.
The Congo River itself is the deepest river in the world and carries the second-largest volume of freshwater discharge after the Amazon, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It is currently not subject to a comprehensive multinational water-sharing agreement. The two nations that share its lower basin, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of Congo, have different economic development trajectories and energy priorities, including a long-discussed proposal to build the Inga 3 hydroelectric dam.
Deforestation rates in the Congo Basin have accelerated in recent years. The University of Maryland's Global Forest Watch platform recorded that the Democratic Republic of Congo lost approximately 490,000 hectares of primary forest in 2023 alone, making it one of the highest rates of primary forest loss globally that year. Drivers include smallholder agriculture, artisanal charcoal production, and, to a lesser extent, commercial logging.
White also addressed illegal logging specifically in his remarks, identifying it as a persistent enforcement challenge throughout his ministerial tenure. Gabon banned the export of unprocessed logs in 2010 in an effort to increase domestic processing and reduce raw extraction incentives. The policy's full economic and conservation impact has been assessed differently by different researchers, with some studies finding it shifted logging pressure rather than reducing it overall.
What remains unknown from White's published remarks is the specific hydrological threshold at which Congo Basin loss would translate into the water-stress levels he considers conflict-generating. Establishing that threshold would require modeling studies that link specific deforestation scenarios to downstream rainfall deficits and then connect those deficits to national food and water security indices. No such comprehensive model has yet been published in peer-reviewed literature, according to current available records.
White's intervention adds a senior policy voice to scientific literature that has for years argued the Congo Basin's fate is not solely a question for the countries that contain it, but one with consequences for the broader African continent.