As leaders pledge to protect forests, Gabon suggests how

GABON, A SMALLCOP, family-run petrostate in west Africa, may seem a rather odd campaigner against global warming. Once Africa’s fifth-largest oil exporter, it profited from the world pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Now, however, it hopes to benefit by helping the world to avoid overheating—and by encouraging rich countries to pay African ones to keep their forests standing. Its advocacy got a boost on November 2nd when the leaders of more than 100 countries pledged at the 26 summit to end deforestation by 2030. To help that happen, rich countries promised to stump up billions of dollars.At least 85% of Gabon, which lies on the equator at the edge of the Gulf of Guinea, is covered in steaming jungle. It is one of six countries that form the massive forest of the Congo basin—the world’s second-biggest tropical rainforest, after the Amazon—which sucks in carbon dioxide through photosynthesis and turns it into leaves and branches. (Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the two Congos and Equatorial Guinea are the other five.) Gabon is not the largest of this group of carbon sinks, but its president, Ali Bongo, is the most eager to offer to protect his country’s forests in exchange for cash from rich countries.