A failure to deliver sustainable development that conserves nature and helps people will be a “massive human tragedy”, a former African environment minister has warned.
Professor Lee White was minister of forests, oceans, environment and climate change in Gabon under president Ali Bongo Ondimba, before a coup in the central African country in August 2023, overseeing its policies on sustainable forestry.
Under the former government, policies were put in place to deliver sustainable forestry, switch from an extractive forest economy to one that kept more money in the country, and to try to secure carbon credits that would see other countries pay to keep Gabon’s forests intact for climate and nature.
Gabon’s forests are part of the highly threatened Congo basin rainforest, and the country is home to a wealth of biodiversity, including western lowland gorillas, forest elephants and chimpanzees.
Prof White warned the loss of the region’s forests would put a huge amount of carbon emissions into the atmosphere, hit water supplies to the Nile and Egypt’s agriculture, and accelerate desertification in the Sahel.
This would create hundreds of millions of climate refugees and destabilise the entire African continent, he said.
“The impacts of climate change in the medium term on peace and security, the stability and therefore the economic impacts and the social impacts are potentially just absolutely catastrophic.”
And Prof White warns that conservation with the kind of sustainable development Gabon has tried to create has to work, or there will be catastrophic impacts of climate change around the world.
“If we can’t make it work, climate change will accelerate, biodiversity loss will accelerate, and we’re going to have to put the planet on life support in 10, 20, 30 years,” he warned.
He pointed to the devastating hurricanes already seen this year, and the threat to water supplies to billions of people in Asia from the melting of the Himalayan glaciers.
“We have to change, we can’t not change, and therefore carbon credits for rainforests, and biodiversity credits and sustainable development just has to work,” he said.
Prof White, from Manchester, was speaking as Sky Documentaries releases an “enviro-thriller”, detailing his life, the fight against corruption and illegal logging cartels and the efforts to secure support for protecting Gabon’s forests at UN climate negotiations.
Gabon claimed to have achieved near-zero rates of deforestation through rules limiting logging in forestry concessions, with the forests monitored by satellites and drones to prevent illegal logging.
And the export of unprocessed logs was banned more than a decade ago, with efforts to encourage international companies to invest in processing factories in Gabon, to ensure the value of the timber and associated jobs are kept in the country.
The idea is to sustain the forest, while shifting Gabon from an extractive economy – where the value of its products end up in other countries where processing takes place – to one where the forests benefit local people.
The country also developed carbon credits under a UN scheme for its forests, but efforts to sell them have been derailed by the coup and saw Prof White arrested and accused of stealing money from the credits scheme before being allowed to leave Gabon.
The former environment minister said it was still early days for the new regime but so far it looked as though the country is maintaining existing policies, and sustainable forestry was contributing more and more to the Gabonese economy so “there’s a good chance that the model is working and will stick”.
– Gabon: Earth’s Last Chance is available to watch on streaming service NOW.
