World News for Students of English

03-04-2023 07:00

Gabon’s home to one of the world’s largest intact rainforests. However, in today’s financial markets, its trees are worth more dead than alive. The country wants to cash in on its efforts by selling carbon credits.

The forests of Gabon absorb and store millions of tons of carbon dioxide every year. For the past decade, the country has carefully protected them, but now, its oil revenue is dwindling and the government’s looking for ways to maximize its revenue from the trees. The multi-pronged Grande Mayumba project will operate in logging, cattle farming, and ecotourism. The high-end safari lodge will cost 2,000 dollars a night, and it’ll be one of the few places left on earth where one can see gorillas, leopards, elephants, and buffaloes and where hippos walk out from the forest directly onto the beach. A joint venture with an Italian company sustainably harvests woods in Gabon, which means harvesting without exhausting the forest’s resources and enabling it to regenerate.

The local community has raised concerns over Grande Mayumba ahead of this year’s presidential election. They worry that restrictions on land could mean that residents can no longer fish, hunt or grow sustainable crops.

Difficult words: cash in (to take advantage of a situation), carbon credit (a permit that allows the owner to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases), dwindle (to decrease gradually), high-end (of very good quality and usually expensive).

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