Forest fires significantly worsening across Africa’s tropical nations, data shows
Por Nick Ferris — – World RSS Feed
special report Forest fires significantly worsening across Africa’s tropical nations, data shows
Exclusive: Prevalence of fires is increasing across the Congo and Guinean tropical forest basins, Nick Ferris reports – as fears grow the great forest sinks of Africa could one day go the way of the Amazon and Indonesia
Sunday 18 October 2026 13:39 BST
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F ires are surging across Africa’s tropical forests – raising fears that the Congo’s forests could suffer the same fate as the Amazon and Indonesia, where deforestation and fires are driving up carbon emissions.
The findings are based on newly-compiled data from Greenpeace’s Global Mapping Hub, which uses modelling based on satellite-detected fire hotspots to identify where fire activity is increasing or decreasing across tropical forest regions in Africa over the period 2001-25. The data suggests that there are many more areas experiencing significant rising fire activity than areas experiencing declining activity.
The findings come as a potentially record-breaking El Niño raises concerns about extreme weather risks into 2027 – while foreign aid cuts from the US and other countries have threatened funding for scientific and climate research as well as fire-fighting programmes.
“Forest loss remains stubbornly consistent in parts of the Congo Basin, and fire is an increasingly important driver,” says Dr Jean Bakouma, country manager for the World Resources Institute (WRI) in the Republic of Congo.
“When primary forests and peatlands in the region burn, the carbon they store can be released, and put the region at risk of turning from a carbon sink into a carbon source,” Bakouma continues. “Increased fire activity can also degrade forest health and reduce the forest resources that communities across the Congo Basin rely on.”
open image in galleryAt the heart of the analysis is the Congo Rainforest Basin, which is the world’s best preserved major rainforest and largest remaining net carbon sink in the tropics, removing an average of 160 million tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent between 2015 and 2024 – roughly equivalent to the emissions of Nigeria.
Long-standing development challenges in many parts of the region – as well as progressive forestry policies in countries like Gabon – have helped to ensure that forests have been preserved longer than elsewhere in the world, though Cameroon (in 2025) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (in 2024) have both seen forest loss reach record highs over the past couple of years.
Africa’s other great tropical basin, the Guinean Forest, which once upon a time stretched across swathes of West Africa, is the scene of a dramatically different story. Threats including logging, agriculture, mining, and climate change have resulted in these forests losing around 90 per cent of their original forest cover.
While their histories may differ, the new analysis shows that forested areas in both of these parts of the continent are witnessing a hugely concerning rise in fires. The findings show how the combined impacts of human activity and climate change threaten these vital ecosystems, while also posing a threat to human lives.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which contains around 60 per cent of the Congo Basin’s forests, is seeing fires increase across large swathes of the country. Analysis of fire hotspots detected between 2001 and 2025 found a significant rise in fires in around one-third of the country when it is divided into 100 sq km sections. While some of these hotspots fall outside forested areas, many are within them.
A similar pattern of increasing fires can also be seen across other countries in the Congo Basin, while Liberia and Guinea – countries that contain some of the last remaining substantial stretches of the Upper Guinean rainforest – show a similar pattern of more cells experiencing more fires than experiencing fewer.
“Governments must take urgent action to halt and reverse deforestation and ecosystem destruction and to limit the burning of fossil fuels,” says Sherelee Odayar, from Greenpeace Africa. “They are home to millions of species of plants and animals, and Indigenous Peoples that have protected and depended on these ecosystems for generations. They also play a critical role in regulating the global climate.”
The findings here build on a growing body of literature, including the high-profile State of Wildfires Report, which are raising the alarm around fire risks in Africa’s tropical forest nations (while also noting that wildfire prevalence is actually declining across much of the rest of the continent). Other studies warn that more people across the continent are being exposed to fire hazards as expanding cities encroach on wildlands, increasing the risk of fires spreading into urban areas.
While becoming more resilient to fires is becoming an ever more pressing need, last year The Independent reported how in fact foreign aid programmes that support fire-fighting efforts in African countries have been slashed. This is largely due to President Trump’s effective closure of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which previously supported fire programmes across Africa, according to experts interviewed.
Growing humanitarian concern
Separate analysis from The Independent shows how the increasing prevalence of fires should be seen as a health and livelihoods risk, in addition to being an environmental concern.
Data extracted and analysed from the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System (GDACS) – a UN- and EU-backed platform that monitors disasters with potential humanitarian impacts – suggests that hundreds of thousands of people across the Congo Basin countries are exposed to fires each year.
The GDACS database is able to estimate people impacted by comparing satellite imagery of fires with population distribution maps.
“The immediate threat to human life is likely to be highly localised, but smoke exposure, damage to crops and livelihoods, and longer-term climate impacts could affect many more people,” says Elsa Ordway, co-director of the Congo Basin Institute at UCLA. “Crucially, current satellite systems probably miss many small and understory fires, so the visible problem may understate the real one.”
Local media occasionally picks up stories of lives put at risk and settlements destroyed in forested territories. Congolese radio station Radio Okapi, for example, reported in August that a bush fire had destroyed a village in Kasongo territory, leaving families homeless and without livelihoods, according to the territory’s administrator, who appealed for emergency aid. The alert came about a week after the fire.
Earlier this summer the station also carried civil-society warnings about bush fires in Kasaï-Central and South Kivu. But such reports are irregular, and village-level damage tends to become known to the media only when local officials or local civil society groups raise the alarm.
Slash-and-burn agricultural practices are a key driver of fires in the Congo Basin, and particularly so in the DRC. This is a traditional farming practice that has been carried out for generations – but intensifying drought and heat as the climate warms increase the risk of fires burning out of control.
“Natural fires appear to be relatively rare in the Congo Basin, and most fires are linked to human activity, such as clearing land for agriculture or renewing pasture during the dry season,” says WRI’s Jean Bakouma. “Deforestation and climate change are creating hotter, drier conditions that mean fires are more likely to spread.”
He adds that the last strong El Niño climate event, in 2015-2016, resulted in increases in fire-driven forest losses in the Central African Republic, the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, raising concerns that the same might happen again with this year’s “super” El Niño.
Simon Lewis, professor of global change science at UCL, suggests that the Congo Rainforest has for a long time been seen as “immune from fire” compared to other parts of the world – but all of this is at risk of changing as the planet warms.
“The concern is there is a tipping point of the rising temperatures and occasional severe droughts that could then allow the Congo Basin’s rainforests to burn,” he says. “The big El Niño that will impact the Congo Basin’s forests next year with extra warming and a severe drought, will be a big test to see if these forests will burn.”
‘More funding for science needed’
Experts warn that a lack of scientific research into the Congo, as well as limited funding and local expertise, have left fire risks in the Congo Basin dangerously understudied.
“There is a problem in the Congo Basin rainforest region in terms of a lack of both scientific information and local experts on climate change and deforestation,” says UCL’s Simon Lewis. “Investment in the region is needed, as the Congo Basin’s forests will remain only if the people of the Congo Basin have the knowledge and tools to protect them, as well as the desire to do so.”
UCLA’s Elsa Ordway agrees that fire prevention and research remain severely underfunded in the region, with the issue attracting far less attention from governments, donors and scientists than fires in the Amazon and Southeast Asia.
“I think we should be seriously concerned, while recognising that the scale and trajectory of the risk remain uncertain,” Ordway says. So long as that uncertainty exists, she adds, we risk immense human suffering, devastating biodiversity loss, and the release of vast amounts of carbon stored in one of the world’s most important ecosystems.
This article has been produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project
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Rethinking Global AidGreenpeaceCongo BasinClimate crisisWildfire
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