Preservation of tropical forests at heart of Gabon's One Forest Festival

The African forest, the Congo Basin, is the largest tropical forest in the world after the Amazon, and spans six countries, including Gabon.

As well as being a treasure trove for biodiversity, forests like these act as the planet’s green lung, with the International Union for Conservation of Nature estimating that they absorb approximately 2.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year.

Preserving tropical forests is central to slowing the effects of climate change, yet despite this, large swathes of forest in the Amazon continue to be destroyed to make way for farm land.

The issue of tropical forest preservation was at the heart of the One Forest Summit, an international conference in Gabon’s capital Libreville, organised by the west-central African nation in collaboration with France.

Euronews correspondent Anne Devineaux went to Gabon to find out more for Focus.

French President Emmanuel Macron, and Gabonese President Ali Bongo announced this month’s One Forest Festival at the COP 27 climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh in November last year.

The festival, which took place on the 1st and 2nd of March, sought to promote North-South solidarity when it comes to climate change, given the precarity of the global south as sea levels rise and extreme weather events become more frequent.

Building on previous One Planet Summits, politicians, international companies, scientists and NGOs gathered in Libreville to discuss the forestry sector, focusing on three key areas; advancing scientific cooperation, sustainability, and finance.

Gabon’s President, Ali Bongo Ondimba, had a clear message for those attending the conference: "There are no better investments today than investing in our forests”.

The second day of the festival honed in on