Brussels, Oct. 12th, 2026 (CPA) – A study by the Dutch-speaking Free University of Brussels (VUB), based on Congolese and Belgian handwritten archives, has revealed a ‘clear signal’ of warming across the entire Congo Basin since the 1960s, in a press release received on Monday by the Belga news agency. “The study is based on data from the paper archives of the National Institute for Agricultural Study and Research (INERA) in Yangambi, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), as well as from Belgian State archives. Analysis of the data highlights warming in the Congo Basin: between 1961 and 1990, the maximum temperatures have risen by around 0.7°C,” the source has assured. According to the source, the minimum temperatures are 0.3°C higher and the average temperatures 0.5°C higher.
And the warming trend has continued throughout the years 2000. The number of hot days per year has almost doubled on average between the years 1960 and 1980, the study has emphasized. During two field campaigns in 2023, Derrick Muheki, a researcher and PhD student at the VUB and lead author of the study, has photographed more than 9,000 handwritten monthly records of meteorological observations, recorded at 37 stations across DRC. These handwritten records have enabled to build a database containing over a million daily meteorological observations which, combined with previously retrieved data, “constitute one of the largest climate datasets for the Congo Basin region, which had previously been neglected by the scientific community”, the VUB emphasises.