Two books on the environment and climate to read this summer!

The first book is entitled “Les Codes verts, tome II”. It was published in 2023 by the Council for Environmental Defence through Legality and Traceability (CODELT), based in Kinsahasa. It compiles 112 national and international legal and regulatory texts ratified over the years by the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in the field of biodiversity. These texts concern, among other things, the protection of ecosystems such as the forests of the Congo Basin, the planet’s second green lung after the Amazon.

This forest massif, which today accounts for almost 70% of the forest cover of the whole of Africa, is the victim of legal silence in the face of massive deforestation, accentuated by mining activities and even urbanisation. According to CODELT, “the dissemination of this book to all professionals who have made environmental and conservation law their subject of work is a first step in the implementation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (SDG15 on terrestrial biodiversity, editor’s note)”.

In the second book, “Le grand livre du climat”, a group of international authors retraces in 446 pages the evolution of a planet polluted by fossil fuels and devastated by ever more intense heat waves and floods. The main author, Greta Thunberg, is a young Swedish environmental activist known for her criticism and advocacy of ecological issues.

The four chapters – “How does the climate work?”, “Is the planet changing before our eyes?”, “What are the impacts on humankind? They are written by the Nigerian philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, the Kenyan Wanjira Mathai, who heads the Africa department of the World Resources Institute (WRI), the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood and the American climatologist Michael Mann, among others.