Less than 10 percent of the habitat now inhabited by the great apes of Africa will be left undisturbed by 2030 if road building, mining camps and other infrastructure developments continue at current levels says a new report to the World Summit on Sustainable Development.

A coalition of international organisations launched on Tuesday a regional project aimed at improving people's lives by providing them with potable water and sanitation facilities such as latrines, the US State Department reported on Wednesday.

The impending famine in Southern Africa has opened up a potential new market for US grain traders and biotechnology corporations. However, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Mozambique have steadfastly refused to accept GM food aid. Malawi, on the other hand, has been forced to accept the GM grain, having had to sell off its own grain surplus to service a debt to a commercial bank.

It is essential that the Johannesburg action plan include a clear recognition of the important role of renewable energy in powering a sustainable world, as well as practical recommendations for what national governments and the international community can do to make this vision a reality.

Environmentalists berated President Bush Tuesday for opting to stay away from the United Nations Earth Summit in Johannesburg, saying it showed a new failure of leadership by the world's most powerful nation.

Top judges from countries as diverse as Costa Rica and Tanzania swapped ideas Tuesday on how best to enforce environmental laws at a meeting ahead of the World Summit on Sustainable Development.

The Public Services International (PSI), a global trade union federation, is planning to use the World Summit on Sustainable Development to call for an end to the privatisation of water supply.

A new WWF report says that the choices that world leaders make on energy at the WSSD will have widespread implications for biodiversity, water supply and food security in Africa.

A cargo of potentially dangerous plutonium has been driven away from South African waters after the Greenpeace ship MV Esperanza set sail from Cape Town to track and monitor the shipment.

An expedition headed to Angola last Wednesday to search for the giant sable, a majestic antelope that scientists hope has survived the southwest African nation's decades-long civil war.

Zambia has refused emergency food aid from the United States despite being one of the countries worst affected by famine in Africa.

The World Health organisation is spearheading a global initiative for healthy environments for children, which will be presented at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. The initiative will work to safeguard the places where children live, learn and play from threats such as unsafe drinking water, air pollution and diseases carried by insects and parasites.

The Eastern Cape provincial government has granted an Australian company a permit to prospect for minerals in a botanical "hotspot" on the Wild Coast, the Eastern Province Herald reports.

The 1990 World Summit for Children pledged to provide universal access to safe water by the end of the century. Why then do 2.2 million people still die each year from preventable diseases associated with a lack of safe water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene?

Joseph Melloh has spent the last three months in a Congolese jail, not for practicing his former career as a professional poacher, but for campaigning against the bushmeat trade and investigating the operations of a logging company in the Congo.

Global water use has increased six-fold over the last century, twice the rate of population growth, and agriculture represents 70 percent of this consumption, the United Nations reports in advance of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD). People across the world are dying from hunger as drought shrivels crops again this year.

Global drug dealers are earning billions of dollars from trade in endangered species and toxic waste, environmental law experts said Monday.

Past control measures adopted by federal, state and local governments against desert encroachment were not only "archaic but lazy", a geologist, Alhaji Dahiru Mohammed, has said.

It is vital that world leaders tackle the growing global water crisis before it's too late and start implementing the Millennium Declaration goals, the head of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has said.

The construction of the Cameroon-Chad pipeline has given rise to environmental, health, social and developmental concerns that need to be addressed before the facility becomes operational, two Cameroonian NGOs reported.