As much as 24% of global disease is caused by environmental exposures which can be averted. Well-targeted interventions can prevent much of this environmental risk, the WHO demonstrates in a report. The report further estimates that more than 33% of disease in children under the age of 5 is caused by environmental exposures. Preventing environmental risk could save as many as four million lives a year in children alone, mostly in developing countries.

Agriculture and Land Affairs Minister Lulama Xingwana said her department would "deal drastically" with landowners who deliberately delayed the land restoration process. The Minister's remarks come amid the revelation by the Commission on Restitution of Land Rights (CRLR) that, in the North West alone, it had been experiencing resistance from landowners who deliberately delayed the restoration process.

The international community should help the new government in the Democratic Republic of Congo tighten its surveillance of the diamond mining industry to lift the poor nation out of corruption and conflict, long associated with trade in the precious gem, a rights group said.

Land reforms in Southern Africa are heavily influenced by the IMF and World Bank rhetoric, University of Malawi researcher and lecturer Professor Wiseman Chijere Chirwa has said. "Our research on land shows that land reforms have no serious analysis of the prospects of the poor," Prof Chirwa said. "We have done so many researches in this area but we don't see proper prospects of the poor."

The Batwa once inhabited the forests of the Virunga Mountains, but by the 1970s, after legislation outlawed hunting and gathering and introduced national parks, the Batwa communities were driven off their ancestral lands. Today, there are about 130 Batwa families living in this area. Most have become beggars or landless labourers working for their Hutu and Tutsi neighbours for less than $1 a day.

A tiny southern Zambian village has become the focal point of a conflict which pits the poor against a corporation backed by a government determined to roll out economic liberalisation across the country. Over 100 families and 17,000 cattle in the village of Kabanje face eviction from their homes and cattle sheds because Zambia Sugar Plc, a private firm, is claiming ownership of the land.

A Canadian company conceived on the principles of corporate responsibility plans to harvest underwater forests. Clark Sustainable Resource Developments is a new venture that plans to secure and operate licences to harvest underwater forests, beginning on Lake Volta, the world's largest reservoir, in Ghana.

Desertification is found to some degree on 30 per cent of irrigated lands, 47 per cent of rain-fed agricultural lands, and 73 per cent of rangelands. Annually, an estimated 1.5 to 2.5 million hectares of irrigated land, 3.5 to 4 million hectares of rain-fed agricultural land, and about 35 million hectares of rangeland lose all or part of their productivity due to land degradation.

Findings of a recent forest assessment in Malawi show "increasing deforestation rates and unsustainable exploitation of non-timber forestry products" in the country's protected areas. The report indicates that Malawi's valuable national parks soon could be degraded entirely.

Two new reports looking into the exploitation of Liberia's strategic natural resources conclude that the government still is not in control of the resources. Ex-combatants grouped by former rebel leaders are still exploiting Liberian diamonds, timber and rubber, controlling entire regions.

They have suffered 350 years of shame and degradation, but, at last, the descendants of the first people to meet southern Africa's white settlers may be able to return to the land that was once theirs. Later this month, the South African government is set to announce a multi-billion rand compensation deal and the return of land to the nomadic Khoekhoen, the South African courts have deemed was stolen under racist mineral-rights laws in the 1920s.

The Green Awards Programme gave awards to organizations, associations and individuals for their significant contributions to environmental protection activities at the national level. The awardees were organizations, associations and individuals engaged in soil conservation, afforestation, biodiversity development, and waste recycling among others.

More than 300 minefields still present one of Angola's biggest challenges to reconstructing its former breadbasket, the central province of Huambo, where villages, farms, water supplies and schools all straddle routes in "suspect areas". The province, with a population of almost two million, reportedly contributed about 22 percent to national cereal production in 1999, but almost three decades of civil conflict, which ended in a peace pact in 2002, devastated the infrastructure and displaced several thousand farmers.

Power shortages have hurt Uganda's economy severely and a plan to recycle garbage to produce power is being investigated, said an official. Businesses see the new initiative as a possible sign of relief after experiencing huge financial losses due to power load shedding. The Kampala City Town Clerk, James Ssegane, said government wants to recycle garbage in the city to generate power as an alternative to hydropower in Uganda.

The Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) offers an efficient and economical method of providing power to South Africa's coastal towns and cities, Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin said. Opening debate on his R683,4-million budget vote in the National Assembly, he noted that global warming had seen nuclear power re-emerge internationally as an attractive alternative form of energy generation.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) plans to woo investors next month to fund the expansion of its Inga hydroelectricity project at a cost of $40bn, its energy minister said. The largest single hydropower initiative in the world - expected to cost nearly twice the price of the giant Three Gorges dam in China - Inga in the western DRC is seen as key to powering up stretches of central and southern Africa.

The Sahara desert alone can capture enough solar energy to supply all the world's electricity needs and more, a United Nations report says. "Deserts are a great expanse of land, and have great potential to supply much, much more," Shafaqat Kakakhel, deputy executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) told IPS at the launch of a report on the deserts to mark Environment Day.

The Namibian government is considering ways to improve its land-reform programme, which has not only been slow, but has also had a negative impact on agricultural production. Since independence in 1990, only 10,000 people have been resettled under the government's land programme, which allows a willing-seller, willing-buyer arrangement or expropriation.

Ghana's centuries-old chieftaincy system is one of Africa's oldest ruling classes. The country's unique system of land ownership, where chiefs frequently control the land for the benefit of the communities they represent, is revealing an ugly side. Land can be leased several times over and thousands of disputes are clogging up Ghana's legal system.

Land redistribution is often seen as a powerful tool in the fight against poverty in areas where a majority of people are rural-based and make a living mostly, if not entirely, off the land. Although some poor people have had their lives transformed by access to more land in the short term, there is no systematic linkage between the programmes for land reform in the region and poverty reduction.