Lac Télé: A Community Reserve on the World's Largest Tropical Peatland

The Cuvette Centrale of the Congo Basin holds roughly 145,500 km2 of tropical peat storing around 30 billion tonnes of carbon — the largest tropical peatland complex on the planet, only mapped in detail in the last decade. The Lac Télé Community Reserve, created in 2001 and covering 4,880 square kilometres of swamp forest, flooded grassland and blackwater channels, is the Republic of Congo's only community-driven protected area and contains the biggest expanse of peatland in any Central African reserve. Around 20,000 people live inside it, fishing and harvesting forest products, and the reserve is co-managed by the Wildlife Conservation Society with the Congolese Agency for Wildlife and Protected Areas and local communities under an agreement built around community governance rather than exclusion. It also holds one of the world's highest densities of western lowland gorillas alongside chimpanzees and forest elephants, and was designated a Ramsar wetland of international importance in 1998.