A shocking reversal — the continent’s forests now emit more carbon than they absorb, threatening global climate targets.
📅 April 13, 2026 🔬 Source: University of Leicester / ScienceDaily / Nature Scientific Reports
What happened?
For decades, Africa’s vast forests — including the Congo Basin, the world’s second largest tropical rainforest — acted as one of Earth’s most important carbon sinks, quietly absorbing billions of tons of CO₂ every year. That era is over. A new study from the University of Leicester, published in Scientific Reports, has confirmed that Africa’s forests crossed a critical threshold sometime around 2010, shifting from net carbon absorbers to net carbon emitters.
The research used high-resolution satellite imagery combined with machine learning and field data to track biomass changes across the entire African continent over a decade. The numbers are stark: between 2007 and 2010, African forests gained approximately 439 billion kilograms of biomass per year. Between 2010 and 2015, that flipped to a net loss of 132 billion kilograms per year — and losses continued through 2017, the last year analyzed.
What’s driving this?
The culprit is primarily deforestation in tropical moist broadleaf forests — the densest, most carbon-rich ecosystems on the continent. These forests store enormous amounts of carbon not just in their trees, but in the soil beneath them. When cleared for agriculture, logging, or charcoal production, that stored carbon is rapidly released into the atmosphere.
While savanna regions showed some biomass gains — likely due to shrub encroachment linked to changes in fire regimes and rainfall — these gains are nowhere near enough to offset the losses from tropical forest destruction. The math simply doesn’t balance out.
⚠️ Why this matters biologically: Tropical forests are biodiversity hotspots — home to over half of all known plant and animal species on Earth. Their loss doesn’t just release carbon; it destroys irreplaceable ecosystems, eliminates species before science can even document them, and disrupts water cycles that regulate rainfall across the continent.
The bigger picture
This discovery seriously complicates global climate models, which have historically counted on African forests as reliable carbon sinks when calculating emissions budgets. If those sinks are now sources, the effective budget for staying below 1.5°C of warming is even tighter than previously calculated.
Researchers are calling for urgent strengthening of forest protection laws, investment in reforestation programs, and satellite-based deforestation monitoring systems with real enforcement behind them. The biology is doing its job — or trying to. The question is whether policy can keep up.
🔬 Key data point: Annual biomass losses of roughly 106 billion kg are not being offset by gains elsewhere on the continent. This alone could jeopardize the Paris Agreement targets, according to the research team.