Science Panel for the Congo Basin Presents its Assessment Report During the 61st AfDB Annual Meeting
On May 26, 2026, the Science Panel for the Congo Basin (SPCB) officially presented the 2025 Congo Basin Assessment Report – Congo Basin Resilience and Sustainability: From the Past to the Future at the Kintele International Conference Center in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, during the 61st Annual Meeting of the Board of Governors of the African Development Bank (AfDB). Structured into four interdisciplinary sections comprising 40 chapters and over 1,000 pages, the report is published online through the SPCB website and Springer Nature. An Executive Summary was previously released at the 30th Conference of the Parties (COP30) in Belém, Brazil, in November 2025.
The session opened with remarks from Prof. Lee White, Honorary Professor at the University of Stirling and SPCB Special Envoy, who served as master of ceremonies. He welcomed Prof. Bila-Isia Inogwabini, Head of the Department of Environmental Resource Management at the Catholic University of the Congo and SPCB Science Policy Officer, who described the scale of the accomplishments: more than 180 scientists worked together for two years to produce the first scientific assessment for the Congo Basin. Inogwabini outlined the report's geographic scope: following forest boundaries rather than national borders, it covers an area of 3,462,806 km², encompassing approximately 70% of the Congo River watershed as well as the entire Ogooué and Sanaga river basins.
Prof. Bonaventure Sonké, from the University of Yaoundé I and Co-Chair of the SPCB, presented the report's critical messages, positioning the Congo Basin forests as essential to the sustainability and resilience of the African continent. He highlighted that the Congo Basin is now the world's largest carbon sink, surpassing the Amazon despite being three times smaller in surface area, underscoring its global importance. Sonké was direct about the pressures the region faces: deforestation, illegal and uncontrolled logging, and an extraction-based economic model. The path forward, he argued, requires local transformation and valorisation of natural resources, stronger and more transparent governance, and urgent investment in training the next generation of scientists.
Dr. Lydie-Stella Koutika, Director and Founder of Soil Care and Environmental Studies (SCES) and Co-Chair of the SPCB, took the stage next. She described the Congo Basin as the "Green Heart of Africa," sending water, the continent's lifeblood, toward the Sahel, the Zambezi, the highlands of Angola and Ethiopia, and ultimately feeding the Blue Nile to Egypt. With the Congo River ranking second globally by discharge at approximately 40,000 m³/s, the Basin's reach is continental in scale. Despite this, it remains the least studied and least funded major tropical forest in the world, with international funders historically directing resources to the better-known Amazon.
Dr. Koutika also outlined the Panel’s next steps. Beyond presenting the report's findings to governments and institutions across the region, the SPCB will publish the full report in English and French. Future steps include targeted policy briefs on identified gaps, such as urban environments, mining, and One Health, to be presented at upcoming Conference of the Parties summits; and the development of a roadmap for the 1000:100:10 initiative, which aims to train 1,000 PhD students and 100 postdoctoral researchers over ten years to address the region's severe scientific capacity deficit. The report will be updated every five years, with summary reports developed in collaboration with the Amazon and Borneo Science Panels.
Dr. Koutika recalled the first Three Basins Summit held in Brazzaville in 2011, bringing together the Amazon, Congo Basin, and Southeast Asia, with a more recent edition in 2023. She acknowledged that the Science Panel for the Amazon's (SPA) 2021 Assessment Report, launched at COP26 in Glasgow, inspired the SPCB to undertake a similar effort for the Congo, a recognition of the importance of South-South collaboration between the world's great tropical forest regions.
Following this overview, Prof. White welcomed Robert Masumbuko, Country Manager for Benin at the African Development Bank Group, to share the AfDB's perspective on the report's findings and recommendations. Masumbuko responded on behalf of AfDB President Dr. Sidi Ould Tah, noting that the Bank's new vision aligns closely with the report, particularly around mobilising African human and financial capital. He put the funding ask in perspective: the $150 million previously cited as needed for Congo Basin research is equivalent to just 50 kilometres of road at typical AfDB project costs. It is achievable. He confirmed the AfDB's commitment to continued collaboration and thanked the scientists for their work.
Prof. White then invited the three ministers accompanying the official presentation.
H.E. Minister Arlette Soudan-Nonault, Minister of the Environment, Sustainable Development and the Congo Basin of the Republic of Congo, and Executive Secretary of the Congo Basin Climate Commission, noted that she has argued for over a decade that the Congo Basin provides a global ecosystem service to the rest of the planet, and that the region demands not financial charity, but “the right to life, the right to development”. She recalled the Three Basins meetings and the persistent gap between the Congo's ecological importance and the investment it receives. She was clear that scientific work requires real financial support, and that scientists must occupy seats in key decision-making spaces. She announced ongoing collaboration between her ministry and the Congo Basin Climate Commission, with Professor Lee White serving as a direct link to the SPCB. She closed with a strong message: "Without science, everything stops."
Introducing herself as a professor of natural resource management now working in political office, H.E. Minister Marie Nyange Ndambo, Minister of the Environment, Sustainable Development, and the New Climate Economy of the Democratic Republic of Congo, spoke of how little-known and underfunded the Congo Basin remains. Since taking office, she launched a programme called "La forêt, c'est nous" (The forest is us), built on the conviction that humans and the forest form an unbreakable symbiosis. The programme has 13 axes, the last being scientific research, because"the forests of the Congo Basin are not yet known, and you cannot sustainably manage what you do not know," as she noted. She called for a minimum of 0.1% of all climate finance flowing into the region to be set aside for research, a small fraction, she argued, that would make an enormous difference. She also endorsed the 1,000-100-10 initiative as necessary and achievable.
H.E. Minister Arlette Bahati Tito, Minister Delegate for the New Climate Economy of the DRC, expressed deep gratitude to the scientists and celebrated the tenacity of Minister Soudan-Nonault in pushing the scientific agenda on the international stage. She highlighted two key takeaways from the session: the critical importance of scientific research and the equal importance of mobilising financing, noting that more than $3 billion had recently been pledged to support projects in the Congo Basin. She reaffirmed her commitment to accompanying the scientists through the reform process.
Prof. White closed the session with brief remarks, expressing gratitude for the presence of ministers willing to be guided by science, and noting that this, more than anything, is what the Congo Basin needs. The event prompted clear momentum: scientists and political leaders standing together, advocating that the Congo Basin, the green heart of Africa, can no longer afford to be one of the world's most important yet least understood tropical forests.
