CANDE - 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 giraffe, 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 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.