Conservation scientist Lee White reflects on four decades spent creating Gabon’s national parks, tackling illegal logging and confronting the failures of global carbon markets.
Climate change will trigger wars over water across much of Africa unless the continent protects the Congo Basin, warns former Gabonese environment minister Professor Lee White.
White describes the Congo Basin as the “pumping heart of Africa”, generating atmospheric rivers – vast streams of moisture in the atmosphere – that sustain agriculture across much of the continent, from the Sahel to the Ethiopian Highlands. If the forest falls, he argues, Africa’s water cycle could collapse with it.
White’s warnings about Africa’s environmental future are rooted in a life shaped by extraordinary experiences. As a schoolboy in Uganda, he regularly found himself in playground fistfights with one of the sons of the late dictator, Idi Amin.
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“He would stare you in the eye and say, ‘I’m gonna tell my dad to kill your dad’,” White recalls.
Life at home was just as extraordinary. His parents had adopted an orphaned chimpanzee named Cedric, who grew up alongside White and his sister.
“My sister, Alison, would be in nappies on one of my mother’s hips, and my brother Cedric the chimpanzee in nappies on the other hip,’ he says.
Those formative years eventually led him to Gabon in early 1989 to do a…
