Nigeria and Cameroon plan to create a cross-border park to protect rare birds and a type of endangered chimpanzee threatened by the bushmeat trade, a conservation group said last Thursday. The announcement was made at the 5th World Parks Congress in the South African port city of Durban, where more than 2,000 scientists, policymakers, and activists are meeting to examine the state of the world's protected areas.

A new study in central Africa suggests that the onslaught on wild game, for what is generally known as bushmeat, threatens wildlife and poor households that depend on it as a source of food and cash income, the Zoological Society of London reported last Wednesday. The society's research results suggest that the current situation is even more serious than previously thought.

Environmental Affairs and Tourism Minister Mohammed Valli Moosa has launched a book highlighting South Africa's strides towards environmentally friendly practices since the dawn of democracy. The book entitled 'People, Parks and Transformation in South Africa - A century of Conservation, A Decade of Democracy'' shows the different phases the country has taken pre-and post-1994 in this regard.

Although ”green” issues will be most noted for their absence at the WTO ministerial conference in Cancun this week, conservationist groups fear that talks will be initiated on new regulations for international investment, which could challenge the existing trade rules that protect the environment.

The number of environmentally protected areas across the globe adds up to more than 100,000, the United Nations announced Tuesday, as leading environmentalists warned global warming was already causing irreparable damage to many sites. The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) published a new database of protected areas at the opening of a 10-day congress on world parks, that kicked off in South Africa's eastern port city of Durban Monday.

A radical change in global climate patterns is causing irreversible damage to the environment, the WWF ecology group warned at an international conservation event in South Africa Tuesday. Coral reefs are under threat due to bleaching, glaciers are melting and species and communities are being forced to migrate, resulting in the loss of rare animals, a WWF study released at the World Parks Congress (WPC) showed.
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A national conference to draft a new policy on water and forestry in the Central African Republic (CAR) opened on Monday in the capital, Bangui, with 250 delegates in attendance. CAR leader Francois Bozize opened the four-day conference, which the minister for water, forestry, fishing and hunting, Maurice Yondo, said was to "value and guarantee forestry resources" in the country.

he oil business does not run smoothly - or cleanly – anywhere in Africa. So what kind of trouble will the oil companies cause when they start drilling off the coast of Tanzania next year? If there is to be a reconciliation between economics and conservation, the ecology of the whole coastline needs to be considered. This process will involve understanding that money and ecology must work in concert.

The bribery case against Acres International Ltd. has been among the more spectacular in recent memory. This landmark legal battle saw the engineering consulting firm convicted on two counts of bribery surrounded allegations that Acres used an agent to bribe the head of a giant water and hydroelectric development in the southern African nation of Lesotho. The court pulled no punches: Acres' "cynical exploitation" of the project, "motivated as it was by greed, is the more reprehensible," Judge Jan Steyn wrote in his judgment. The company's reputation, he predicted, "will be sullied by the conviction and it will live in the shadow of the taint of corruption." But what action will the World Bank, a major funder of the project, and the Canadian government take against the company?

Communities in the ecologically sensitive Wild Coast region have declared that a proposed multi-billion rand toll road will not benefit established communities. "The motive for this road is not for the development of the local people and communities but profits for big business, notably engineering, trucking, mining and finance corporations," declared a resolution against the road.

Is land reform compatible with wildlife management? Zimbabwe is seeking to combine the redistribution of large, 'under-utilised' landholdings to smallholders, with wildlife management, which needs extensive land holdings to be viable. Whilst one stresses direct redistribution, equity and land for crops, the other emphasises maximising foreign exchange earnings, encouraging public-private partnerships and relies on trickle down. This paper by the Department of Sociology at the University of Zimbabwe considers why Zimbabwe is attempting to combine the two, and whether it is possible.

A leading French company is among those the Government has nominated to be contacted over the possibility of constructing the stalled Bujagali hydro-electric power project in Jinja. Sources said the French-owned Electricite De France (EDF), Union Fonesa International of Spain, South Africa's Eskom Enterprises Pty and the UK-based CDC Capital Partners were among those short-listed for the delayed 250-megawatt Bujagali dam.

Is it true that the best way to fight hunger, protect the environment and reduce poverty in Africa is by relying on Green Revolution crop varieties, and using more imported farm chemicals, plus genetic engineering and free trade? This is precisely what powerful institutions in Washington and elsewhere are prescribing for the continent, yet each of these elements could actually worsen, rather than improve conditions for Africa's poor majority. The chapters of this publication challenge the persistent myths that underlie elite "solutions" for Africa. Each chapter illustrates that another Africa is possible, as delegates declared in 2002 at the African Social Forum in Bamako, Mali. The study - developed through years of research at the Institute of Food and Development Policy and the University of California at Berkeley - presents the first comprehensive analysis of the Green Revolution in Africa, combining perspectives from hundreds of local project leaders, policymakers, academics, and social justice advocates.

Crude oil from a ruptured oil pipeline caught fire, destroying farmland and polluting streams in the Ogoni area of southeastern Nigeria, residents said on Monday. Residents of Gio, a small Ogoni community 40 km east of Port Harcourt, said they were roused from their sleep in the early hours of Friday by a loud bang as crude oil gushing from the broken pipeline caught fire.

Painted hunting dogs, also known as Cape hunting dogs or African wild dogs, so named for their individual and elaborate skin markings, are some of the most maligned of Africa's predators. What is known about them now is that they are very social animals living in large packs numbering up to 40. There is usually one breeding female in each pack, which gives birth to a litter of up to 10 pups at a time that the whole pack takes turns in looking after. The dogs used to be a common part of the African wilderness. But with the advent of the European colonisation, they were branded vermin and mercilessly persecuted, to the extent of being eradicated from national parks.

Early next week a French-led contingent of multinational troops will pull out of the Congo town of Bunia after barely three months of peacekeeping. A replacement force will serve a further year in an attempt to end the regional conflict which since 1998 has claimed more than 3.3 million lives. But while efforts are rightly focused on seeking a truce between the Hema and Lendu militia groups, and urging an end to Ugandan and Rwandan interference, western diplomats might also think about getting their own houses in order. In an uncanny repetition of western intervention in the region that dates back to the 19th century, complicit multinational corporations and unknowing - or unthinking - western consumers have contributed to the regional conflagration.

Uganda’s Universal Primary Education (UPE) programme has increased the numbers of children passing through primary school to such an extent that it risks causing a massive bottleneck in secondary school entrance unless steps are taken to increase capacity, Ugandan ministers have said.

A series of militia attacks on the town of Fataki, 60 km northwest of Bunia, have left 200 people dead, 237 abducted and the town deserted, an official of the Hema militia group Union des patriotes congolais (UPC) told IRIN on Sunday.

Nine years after international outrage stopped the cull of elephants in the Kruger National Park, more than 3 000 of the beasts face the new threat of a death sentence -- because science has failed to come up with a cheap elephant contraceptive.

Up to 93% of women in Uganda are landless, the parliamentary women's association vice-chairperson, Loice Biira Bwambale, says. Bwambale was recently delivering a paper on land ownership and women rights in Uganda at a workshop organised by the Ugandan women parliamentarians association and the European parliamentarians for Africa. She blamed the discrepancy on negative traditional practices which exclude women in land ownership.