Dearth of local scientists hinders research on rainforest

Bila-Isia Inogwabini strides up and down between rickety wooden desks in a small classroom in Kinsasha in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, offering good-natured criticism to his clutch of graduate students. “Don’t make your life difficult, keep things simple,” says the college professor to one young man, whose research project on the impact of pesticides he’s deemed unfocused, writes Emmet Livingstone for Science.

Ten masters students, mostly middle-aged men and women, are listening and taking notes, awaiting their turn to present their thesis proposals before three exacting professors. The scene is an uncommon one in the impoverished Central African nation, where there is a severe shortfall of environmental researchers – a situation experts view as a threat to the long-term survival of the Congo River Basin rainforest, the second largest in the world after the Amazon rainforest.

“We’re getting old, we need people to replace us,” says Inogwabini (59), whose beard is flecked with white. Specialising in biodiversity and climate change, Inogwabini is one of a tiny number of Congolese environmental scientists who publish research in international journals. Affiliated with Sweden’s Uppsala University – which is providing funding – Inogwabini recently founded a Department of Environment and Natural Resources Management at the Catholic University of Congo in an effort to make better scientific training available to his compatriots.
Full report on the Science site