ナショナルジオグラフィックさんのインスタグラム写真 - (ナショナルジオグラフィックInstagram)「Photo by @michaelchristopherbrown / Men in Kisangani, Democratic Republic of the Congo, load oversize logs onto cargo boats to be carried down the Congo River toward the capital of Kinshasa and on to the rest of the world. The Congo Basin, larger than the state of Alaska, contains the world’s second largest tropical forests, our second lung after the Amazon. Basin forests, a huge carbon sink holding roughly 8 percent of the world's forest-based carbon, are biodiversity hot spots accessed by an estimated 40 million Africans who survive through traditional livelihoods such as hunting, fishing, farming, and wood/charcoal production. According to a recent University of Maryland study, smallholder clearing in the DRC, the largest of the six countries with forests located inside the Basin, accounted for at least two-thirds of total Basin forest loss, with 92.2 percent of this clearing done mostly by farmers utilizing slash-and-burn to feed their families rather than logging, industrial agriculture, and other activities. The same study found that if the population of Basin countries, including the DRC, increases by an expected five fold in the coming decades, along with the likely addition of industrial-scale agriculture, the region’s primary forests are projected to be cleared by 2100. In the first 14 years of the 21st century, an area larger than the size of Bangladesh was felled in the Congo River Basin rainforest. Follow @michaelchristopherbrown for more human stories from around the world.」1月6日 20時38分