Clad in camouflage and grasping a tape measure in one hand, Vincent Medjibe is hugging a tree in the Gabonese rainforest, trying to gauge its size. Since 2011 he has been in charge of calculating how much carbon is locked into his country’s trees, one of the world’s last remaining tracts of intact tropical forest.
“It’s very labour intensive work,” said Medjibe, who dispatches teams deep into the jungle to measure trees and take samples from the soil. “Normally you have to walk 3 or 4 days into the forest before you can even start. Then you can have anywhere up to 400 trees to survey.”
Roughly 90% of Gabon is covered by thick jungle, an area around the size of the United Kingdom. This forest, part of the Congo Basin, is teeming with biodiversity, home to lowland gorillas, chimpanzees and most of Africa’s critically endangered forest elephants.
It also acts as a massive carbon sink.
Acco
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