Kenya has begun moving 400 elephants from one national park to a larger one in what it calls the biggest transport of animals "since Noah's Ark", reports the BBC. The animals, which weigh two to four tons each, are being shot with tranquiliser darts, loaded onto special trucks and driven eight hours north. There was a serious overcrowding problem at the Shimba Hills Reserve, the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) said.

In the Senegalese village of Yoff, just a few kilometres up the coast from the capital Dakar, the hundreds of canoes lined up along the seaside tell the whole story. Despite growing urbanisation, fishing by traditional methods remains a vital occupation, a key part of the country's economy - and just as important, a way of life. But this sector is now threatened, reports the BBC, not only by the competition of the huge boats of the industrial sector, both local and international, but also by its own unregulated development and practices.

Ghana's Ministry of the Environment and Science issued draft biosafety legislation in August, intended to protect the country's citizens and environment from the potentially damaging effects of genetically modified (GM) organisms. The implication is that the government is open to allowing GM products in the country. Yet this is in direct contrast to comments made less than a month ago by the country's food and agriculture minister.

Senegal is pushing to plant a "Great Green Wall" of trees stretching for nearly 7,000 km (4,375 miles), from Dakar to Djibouti, to stop the relentless advance of the Sahara desert. Environment Minister Modou Fada Diagne said the West African country, which hosted a meeting of experts this week, would start planting trees this year in the eastern Ferlo region which borders Mauritania and Mali. "Instead of waiting for the desert to come to us, we need to attack it," Fada Diagne told Reuters in an interview late last Thursday.

The extent to which dams affect the world's large river systems is the focus of a major new study by a research team from the Landscape Ecology Group at Umeå University, Sweden. The rivers studied drain 54% of the world's land area and carry 60% of the planet's river-water. The researchers found that of 292 large river systems, 172 are affected by dams. An article in the latest edition of World Rivers Review, published by the International Rivers Network, interviewed the researchers involved.

Minister of Solid Mineral Resources, Mrs. Oby Ezekwesili, has accused oil and gas companies operating in the country of corrupt practices, and said that was the reason why they avoid disclosure of their annually generated revenue and expenditures. Ezekwesili, who was speaking in Port Harcourt at the road show of the Nigeria Extractive Industry Trans-parency Initiative (NEITI), said it was to check the sharp practices in the oil industry that President Olusegun Obasanjo has sent a bill to the National Assembly to ensure that the annual revenues and expenditures of oil and gas companies are audited and published.

Despite concerns over political and corporate corruption combined with failures in accountability and transparency worries, the government of Uganda seems set on bulldozing ahead with the planned Bujagali Dam, write Muramuzi Frank and F.C. Oweyegha-Afunaduula. The dam would destroy the Bujagali Falls on the Nile and affect the livelihoods of about 6,800 people.

The Bujagali Dam project, which was proposed in the late 1990s, is one of the most controversial dam projects in the world, and according to the Uganda government is set to continue. The government in April this year announced that it had selected the Aga Khan’s Industrial Promotion Services (IPS) to build the Dam at Dumbbell Island 8 km from the Owen Falls Dam downstream of the river Nile.

According to government, it is “electricity loadshedding” which is driving it (government) to have this dam built as soon as possible, ostensibly to solve the problem. Therefore, this means that it is not the development effectiveness of the project that is driving the process. However, it is now well known that Bujagali Dam is not the least-cost option of the several dams that were proposed in Uganda’s Energy Master Plan ten years ago because it does not seriously factor in costs due to losses in tourism, environmental quality, culture and spirituality as well as socio-economic and socio-political stability. Moreover, it has been established that the cost of Bujagali Dam was skewed to make it appear as if it is twice as cheap as Karuma Dam further downstream of the Nile. Karuma in fact is cheaper and, if built, will not be environmentally, socially and culturally destructive. Even in terms of tourism, there will be virtually no destruction because the dam will not affect the Falls. Further the Karuma dam’s electricity will be cheaper.

Despite government determination to continue with the discredited Bujagali Dam project, many issues remain unresolved. Even the World Bank’s own transparency and accountability watchdogs, the International Finance Corporations (IFCs) Ombudsman and the Inspection Panel found in 2001 and 2002 respectively that the issues involved were critical and required attention. They recommended that if the project were to have development effectiveness, they should not be ignored. The issues of concern remain at the core of civil society action on the Bujagali dam. Unfortunately, they are being ignored and have been loosely explained away by Uganda’s Ministry of Energy in its March 22nd 2005 response to outstanding Bujagali environmental issues raised by National Association of Professional Environmentalists (NAPE) on February 28th 2005.

The issues, which Ugandans have repeatedly and increasingly raised, include the following:
- The political and corporate corruption in the dam process;
- The opportunity cost of Bujagali Falls based tourism;
- Resettlement and compensation related issues;
- Under-valuing of spiritual and cultural wealth of the Bujagali Falls;
- The Government’s failure to show that the price of electricity from the proposed Bujagali Dam will be affordable by the majority of Ugandans;
- The fluctuating cost of the building of Bujagali Dam, which a 2002 study by Prayas of India found to be too costly and not conforming to international standards in the dam construction industry;
- Ignoring the cumulative impacts of Kiira Dam, Nalubaale Dam and the proposed Bujagali Dam, which are close to each other;
- Ignoring comprehensive assessment of the available energy alternatives;
- Falling water levels in Lake Victoria, which unfortunately government has variously blamed on drought - ignoring the real possibility that the reason could be the construction of two dams parallel to each other and drawing water from the same source point;
- Deliberate exclusion of accountability and transparency from the Bujagali Dam process.

The World Bank’s private investment arm, the IFC, was to be the major lender for the project, but pulled out after AES withdrew in August 2003 due to the unresolved controversies surrounding the project. The Bank has not indicated whether or not it will get involved this time. Since the World Bank backed off from the project in 2002, the Ugandan government has proposed various funding mechanisms, from an infrastructure development bond to raiding the National Social Security Fund (NSSF) to pay for the dam. NSSF is a fund to which the country’s workers contribute monthly towards their social security after they have retired from active service.

It is now clear that if government is bent on pursuing the project, the already overtaxed citizens will have to shoulder the cost of the dam as this year’s national budget further vividly suggests. However, the recent debt relief extended to the poorest of the poor countries of Africa of which Uganda is one, might as well be another source of badly needed funds for this dam burden. Yet debt relief indicates that Uganda cannot sustain its economy nor bear the burden of further debt. The wise thing to do with the debt relief is to use the money, which would have been used for debt repayment, to provide social services and security to the citizens’ health and education.

Unfortunately civil society’s views continue to be dismissed by government as encumbrances to industrialization, poverty eradication, economic growth and availability of electricity. NAPE and others who have been raising these issues are not anti-hydropower or against development but work for sustainable development in Uganda’s energy sector, evaluation of technologies and the pursuit of the best energy option for Uganda.

* Muramuzi Fran is Executive Director of the National Association of Professional Environmentalists (NAPE); F.C. Oweyegha-Afunaduula is Coordinator of the Save Bujagali Crusade.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

South Africa needs to revise its approach to land reform to end racial inequalities, government officials say. At a national land summit in Johannesburg, Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said the current market-based approach was not working.The land summit - which brings together politicians, landowners and organisations representing people who hope to benefit from land reform - will discuss ways of speeding up the redistribution process.

Just over a decade ago, Cameroon drafted a law that was intended to regulate commercial use of the country's forests. In spite of this, corruption and uncontrolled exploitation are putting forest areas at risk, say non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The 1994 Law on the Regulation of Forests, Fauna and Fishing contains clauses that limit logging, with a view to protecting the environment. Those who wish to exploit Cameroon's forests must obtain permits from the Ministry of Forests and Fauna.

Ministers attending the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Ministerial Conference on Biotechnology have adopted a resolution asking member countries to prepare their national biosafety frameworks by 1 July 2006, so as to facilitate harmonization in the region by 2008. The conference, held from 21-28 June 2005 in Bamako, Mali, also produced a number of other resolutions, which addressed: adoption of measures by the ECOWAS Secretariat to facilitate implementation of a regional strategic plan on biosafety; increased budget allocations to agriculture; and prioritization of funding research for biotechnology tools for small farmers.

While accounts of illegal logging in southeast Asia's and central Africa's tropical forests, to supply the booming Chinese economy are increasingly common, this report is one of the first to document the "Chinese takeaway" from the semi-arid forests of Southern Africa. A four-months study of forestry in Zambezia province of Mozambique was conducted between November 2003 and October 2004. It found Chinese traders, local business people, and members of the Government and forest services are colluding to strip precious tropical hardwoods from these slow-growing forests at a rate that will exhaust the resource in 5-10 years.

Africa - Up in Smoke?, the second report from the coalition of the UK's top environment and development groups, the Working Group on Climate Change and Development says that efforts to alleviate poverty in Africa will ultimately fail unless urgent action is taken to halt dangerous climate change. The report says that G8 nations have failed to 'join-the-dots' between climate change and Africa. Unless addressed, this could condemn generations in the world’s poorest nations.

Climate change could drastically alter the distribution of thousands of plant species across Africa, say scientists. The researchers, led by Jon Lovett of the University of York in the United Kingdom, looked at 5,197 species of African plants — about 10-15 per cent of the continent's plant species. Using computer models that predict future climate, the researchers concluded that by 2085, the habitats in which nearly all of these plants can live would either shrink or shift, often to higher altitudes, as a result of anticipated changes in Africa's climate.

The existence of big oilfields in Sudan’s war-ravaged Darfur region has added a new twist to a bloody, two-year-old conflict, potentially turning the quest for peace into a tussle over resources. Sudan announced in April that its ABCO corporation - which is 37 percent owned by Swiss company Clivenden - had begun drilling for oil in Darfur, where preliminary studies showed there were “abundant” quantities of oil.

Communities from across the Niger Delta, with the support of Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA), have filed a legal action against the Nigerian government, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation and the Shell, Exxon, Chevron, Total and Agip joint venture companies to stop gas flaring. More gas is flared in Nigeria than anywhere else in the world, and flaring in the country has contributed more greenhouse gas emissions than all other sources in sub-Saharan Africa combined according to the World Bank.

Environmental degradation is threatening the health and livelihoods of two billion people living in arid regions round the world, says an international team of researchers. They say that desertification - the irreversible degradation of drylands due to climatic factors and human activities - is among the world's greatest environmental challenges.

Liberia's transitional government has signed offshore exploration agreements with three little-known oil companies, just three months before elections to return the war-scarred West African country to democracy. Musa Dean, the head of the state-run National Oil Company of Liberia (NOCAL), announced the three deals last Thursday as the international community considered hard-hitting proposals to limit the government’s economic powers in order to crack down on rampant corruption.

A project to manage groundwater and drought in southern Africa was approved by the World Bank (WB) this week. The Groundwater and Drought Management project will cost US $7.5 million, and is being funded by a $7 million grant from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), with the remainder provided by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA).

Friends of the Earth has reacted with anger at the content of a fresh leak of the draft communique on climate change for next month's G8 Summit which has deleted proposals to fund research and worryingly even calls into question scientists' warnings that global climate change is already under way. The document entitled 'Gleneagles Plan of Action', dated 14 June, has been watered down from a previous draft which itself had no specific targets or timetables for action. The latest draft also backs the use of so-called "zero-carbon" nuclear power.

South Africa will next week seek to defeat a Japanese proposal to expand whale hunting as it would threaten a growing industry catering to people who enjoy watching the huge mammals, a senior official said. The International Whaling Commission (IWC) is due to vote on Japan's plans at a meeting in South Korea from June 20-24.