"While many are celebrating the Kyoto Protocol’s entering into force this week, others are finding cause for grave concern. A coalition of NGOs, social and environmental activists, communities, scientists and economists from around the world concerned about the climate crisis, the Durban Group, charged that the 1997 climate treaty not only fails to cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert climate catastrophe, but also steals from the poor to give to the rich. The Kyoto Protocol says that industrialized country signatories must reduce their emissions 5.2% below 1990 levels by 2008-2012. However, the group noted, the scientific community has called for global reductions of over 60% below 1990 levels."

The Environmental Health Technical Coordinator is in charge of technical standards and quality in IRC Burundi's environmental health programs across the country, and strengthens the capacity of national environmental health staff.

Water privatisation company Veolia's three large contracts in Africa - Gabon, Chad and Niger - have all been unsuccessful, leaving the corporation weak on the African continent, according to a new report from advocacy group Public Citizen. "Without additional public subsidies Veolia has been unable to compete and instead has concentrated on debt reduction. However, in Ghana the corporation is still considered a contender for an upcoming water contract. Meanwhile Ghanaians are seeking to oppose the water privatization altogether."

The world's biggest gold firms are banding together against proposals to sell gold from International Monetary Fund stockpiles, fearing tumbling gold prices. Finance chiefs of the rich Group of Seven nations asked IMF Managing Director Rodrigo Rato last weekend to report by April on proposals for using IMF gold reserves to write off debts owed by the fund's poorest borrowers.

Of all the negative environmental and social impacts of privatisation, the most profound one is the marginalisation of poor consumers as companies shift to more profit-orientated policies. "Water companies tend to prioritise water delivery to rich urban neighbourhoods, and ignore the often more desperate needs for safe drinking water in remote rural communities and other poor sectors of society," says a report published by Friends of the Earth that discusses the impacts of privatisation of water supply and biodiversity on the poor throughout the world, especially women.

The director of an international company that took part in the construction of the Lesotho Highlands water project is to be charged with paying a R1 million bribe to a top water commission official. Raymond Stock, a Lahmeyer International director, allegedly paid the money during the period of 1996-99 to Reatile Mochebelele, the then head of the Lesotho Highlands Water Commission.

Madagascar is fast losing its forest wilderness. But villagers are angered by moves to prevent them cutting down trees in recently created nature reserves. The huge Indian Ocean island is home to some 200,000 plant and animal species - three-quarters of which are found nowhere else and are the product of millions of years of separate evolution since it broke away from Africa when the continents first formed.

Fewer than one in five companies surveyed could provide a meaningful account of their policy to prevent the trade in diamonds from regions of conflict, states Amnesty International. The disappointing results come more than two years after the diamond industry committed itself to a system of self regulation including the issuing of written warranties and the implementation of a code of conduct in support of the international Kimberly Process Certification Scheme. "The trade in conflict diamonds in countries like Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone, has already led to the destruction of nations and cost millions of lives. Yet for some companies the response has been, 'we are not concerned, there are other things more important in life,'" said Alessandra Masci of Amnesty International.

Thousands of South Durban residents have said no to City Manager, Mike Sutcliffe regarding a proposed Spatial Development Plan. At a meeting, Speaker after speaker from different organisations, Trade Unions, Civic Structures and Medical Practitioners said that they did not trust the City Council and saw no benefit in the SDB Spatial Development Plan for the residents of South Durban. The only benefit would be increased pollution, loss of housing and industrial benefits for the major Petro-Chemical and Paper Industries.

In the past five years, 48,900 wire snares have been found by conservationists along the game trails that crisscross this country famed for its abundant wildlife. Illegal hunting is flooding the market with inexpensive "bush meat." The poachers who set these traps were once after elephant and rhino ivory, but controversial trade bans have shut down those sales. While the scope of the problem is not fully known, conservationists say it could endanger Africa's wildlife as much the great herd massacres of the 1970s and 1980s.

Swaziland's main industries are sugar and forestry. Both require large areas of land. "They are a disaster for a country like Swaziland, where there are still feudal social relations," said Nhlanhla Msweli of the Swaziland Campaign Against Poverty and Economic Inequality (SCAPEI) at a meeting in South Africa in 2003. In a country where the majority of people are landless, industrial tree plantations cover almost 10 percent of the land. A new report written by Wally Menne of the TimberWatch Coalition, "Timber Plantations in Swaziland" describes the impact that industrial tree plantations have had on the people and the environment in Swaziland.  Although many of the plantations were established more than 50 years ago, the impacts of industrial tree plantations "still have a profound effect on society and the environment and will continue to do so as long as the plantations remain," writes Menne.

Leaders of seven African nations have signed a joint treaty to protect their continent's massive rainforest - second only to that found in the Amazon basin. They were joined by international officials as well as French President Jacques Chirac in the Congolese capital, Brazzaville. The treaty aims to breathe new life into a conservation project set up five years ago, which has not progressed.

At least 30 people were killed and around 2,000 displaced during clashes between pastoralists and farming communities in various parts of Kenya in January 2005. The recent unrest broke out when pastoral groups accused farming communities of diverting scarce water supplies. Kenya still hosts around 360,000 people who were displaced by political violence in the 1990s.

Nigerian troops on Friday shot and killed four villagers who were protesting at the main export terminal run by ChevronTexaco in the Niger Delta, one of the demonstration's organisers said. More than 200 protesters from the village of Ugborodo near Warri stormed the Escravos plant just before dawn to demand a fairer share of the 300,000 barrels of crude oil that are pumped out every day.

In the oil-rich Niger Delta, the struggle among local leaders for oil revenue and government funds has fueled violent clashes between rival armed groups, Human Rights Watch said in a new report. An escalation in violence last year killed dozens of innocent people and disrupted oil production, pushing global crude futures over a record $50 a barrel. The 22-page report, "Rivers and Blood: Guns, Oil and Power in Nigeria's Rivers State," based on a December fact-finding mission to the region, documents fighting between armed groups in the southeastern oil-producing state that escalated in late 2003 and continued throughout 2004. The clashes resulted in the indiscriminate killing of local people, displaced tens of thousands of villagers from their homes, and forced the oil industry to evacuate staff and scale back its production. On October 1, the federal government brokered a peace agreement between the two main rival armed groups. The federal and state governments then granted an amnesty to the fighters. While commending the government's effort to end the conflict, Human Rights Watch said that the perpetrators of grave human rights abuses must not be given immunity from prosecution.

The tall man is skeletal. Even so, it is a huge feat for him to muster up the energy to sit upright in front of his visitor – a young, vibrant woman. They sit on wooden chairs around a small table in the centre of a starkly bare room. Lying on the table are a wall clock and several packets of pills – for the time being, things that are key to the man’s survival. "Why do you have to go yourself to the hospital tomorrow?" asks the 31-year-old woman, Louisa*. The man, 51-year-old Fernando, coughs and then replies faintly, between gasps of breath, "My wife doesn’t understand Portuguese well, so it is difficult with the doctors."

Urgent action must be taken in order to prevent Africa from bearing the brunt of global warming, a scientific conference on climate change was told. If current trends continued, temperatures in sub-Saharan Africa could rise by 2C with rainfall declining by 10%, according to Anthony Nyong, a scientist at Jos university in Nigeria. "There must be substantial and genuine reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by the principal emitters," Dr Nyong wrote in a paper presented to the conference, taking place in Exeter.

Biodiversity ‘the total variety of life on earth’ (1) is the foundation upon which human civilizations have thrived. At present, this ‘foundation’ is at risk of being uprooted by human activities. Scientist estimate that loss of biodiversity due to human activities, has increased from a background extinction rate of 1 species per million species per year to a present day value of about 10 000 species per million species per year (2). Indicted amongst the plethora of human activities accelerating biodiversity loss are the activities of multinational business corporations hereafter referred to as MNC’s (3). It is estimated that global trade principally by MNCs in products derived from biodiversity is about one trillion dollars per annum (4). The negative impact of MNCs on biodiversity has been linked to its classical and neo-classical economic foundations, which failed to incorporate social and environmental concerns into economic decision making.

To redress this oversight and in response to the sustainable development paradigm, economists today have developed several tools for the appropriate evaluation of nature. The most prominent of these is the concept of total economic evaluation (TEV), which enables MNCs to quantitatively approximate the economic value of natural capital (5) This development has come at a time when the international community through the UN Convention on Biological Biodiversity (UNCBD) and Agenda 21, has challenged MNCs to proactively shoulder their share of the cost of conserving the planets biodiversity. It is maintained that to get business to be more responsive to biodiversity conservation, the primary drivers have to be international/national legislations coupled with pressure from civil society such as consumer boycotts (6). However, moderate voices within the business-biodiversity debate while not ruling out the need for legislation and civil society pressure, are of the opinion that the way to a more biodiversity responsive business community is through the forging of mutually profitable partnerships between the business community and the biodiversity community (7).

The negative impact of MNCs with respect to the environment is well documented in the case of the oil and gas sector due to high profile incidents including the Exxon Valdez, the Brent Spar and the Ogoni (8). This has led to a real fear in the sector of its members losing their licence to operate. The sector is thus proactively involved in initiatives presenting it as biodiversity friendly, examples include the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) business-biodiversity initiatives, the World Bank’s Business Partners for Development (BPD) initiative, the UN Global Compact initiative and the Energy Biodiversity Initiative (EBI) under the auspices of Conservation International (CI).

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As a national human rights organization advocating inter alia the universal right to a clean and safe environment, Namibia’s National Society for Human Rights (NSHR) deplores plans to open yet another uranium mine in the country. “As if the danger to human life and the environment posed by the existing Rossing Uranium Mine (RUM) is not grave enough, the government is allowing yet another uranium mine in the country”, wondered NSHR executive director Phil ya Nangoloh.

Lured by an array of incentives, a growing number of African- Americans are trading countries for a new life in Ghana. Centuries ago, the Gold Coast — Ghana's name under British rule — was a major slave-embarkation point; every year thousands of Africans left here to become human chattel in the New World. Untold numbers died in slave raids or making the "middle passage" in cramped, pestilential ships. Some parts of Africa were left virtually unpeopled. The tide was reversed in 1957, when Ghana became one of the first countries in sub-Saharan Africa to gain independence from colonial rule.