The Congo Basin and Central African Rainforest

The Congo Basin rainforest, covering roughly 3.7 million square kilometers across the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Gabon, and Equatorial Guinea, is the second-largest contiguous tropical rainforest on Earth after the Amazon, and it remains the single largest carbon sink of any tropical forest region still absorbing more carbon than it emits, according to long-running plot-monitoring networks such as AfriTRON. At its heart lies the Congo River, which at roughly 4,700 kilometers is Africa's second-longest river and, by discharge, the world's second-largest after the Amazon, draining a basin of about 4 million square kilometers. Because its headwaters lie in both hemispheres, the Congo is unusual among major rivers in crossing the equator twice, which keeps its flow remarkably steady year-round rather than sharply seasonal. Along its course, the river drops through a spectacular 1,600-kilometer stretch of rapids and cascades near its mouth and through Boyoma Falls (formerly Stanley Falls) upstream at Kisangani, obstacles that historically blocked navigation into the interior and that today represent an enormous, only partially developed hydroelectric resource concentrated at the Inga Falls site, where the proposed Grand Inga Dam project has been repeatedly discussed as potentially the largest hydropower scheme in the world.