The World’s Second Lung

If you follow climate change news, you probably know that South America’s Amazon rain forest is being cut down, burned, and cleared to make room for farms and ranches. This is a devastating blow to efforts to curtail climate change because it not only puts more carbon dioxide (CO₂) into the atmosphere, adding to greenhouse gases already warming up our planet, but also destroys vegetation that removes CO₂ from the air.

But did you know that the same thing is happening in the heart of Africa, in the Congo Basin rain forest, the largest forest in Africa, sometimes called “the world’s second lung”? Every year the Congo Basin rain forest removes 600 million tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere. Yet in the fourteen years from 2000 to 2014 an area of rain forest larger than the country of Bangladesh was cleared in the Congo Basin. At this rate, the Congo Basin rain forest could disappear by the year 2100.

Climate change is already ravaging Africa with heat waves, droughts, and flooding rains, which have drowned some and starved others. You may have seen recent reports about the terrible famine in Madagascar caused by four years of climate-change-induced drought—a famine that is endangering the lives of tens of thousands of Africans.

But climate change is affecting everyone. Severe drought in the western United States is drying up lakes and promoting wildfires. More powerful hurricanes are impacting coastal areas in many parts of the world. And it is only getting worse.

You can read more about how and why climate change is happening, and how it may be fulfilling biblical prophecy, in Chapter 11 of my book, Beyond Blind Faith, entitled “Apocalypse Soon,” which you read for free here: https://dondavidson.net/apocalypse-soon/. If you want to purchase the book, it is available on Amazon. The e-book is only 99 cents.

The foregoing is based in part on the article, “Raising Africa’s Voice,” in Time Magazine, November 8-15, 2021.