The Congo Basin, a region of tropical forest larger than India, is at a point where further damage may rob the world of a crucial bulwark against climate change.

That’s the conclusion of the first comprehensive scientific report about the state of the environment in a region that stretches from Cross River in Nigeria to the Rift Valley in East Africa. An executive summary of the 800-page report, authored by 177 experts from across the basin and beyond, was released Monday for the COP 30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil.

The region’s forests currently absorb 600 million tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide a year, equivalent to Germany’s emissions. That makes the basin the world’s biggest tropical carbon sink. But deforestation is threatening to upend the forests’ ability to remove carbon

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