International World Water Day, held every 22 March, focuses public attention on the importance of fresh water and promotes sustainable management of freshwater resources. This year’s theme, ‘Clean Water for a Healthy World’, reflects the importance of water quality in natural resource management.

Ministers of Environment from ECOWAS Member States will meet on Thursday in Accra, Ghana, to adopt a draft regional programme of action to reduce vulnerability to climate change in West Africa. Experts from the region, currently meeting in Accra to validate the document, will present their recommendations to the ministers for consideration, according to a communique from the ECOWAS Commission in Abuja, the Nigerian capital.

Many Africans blame themselves for climate change even though fossil fuel emissions there are less than 4% of the global total, a new survey suggests. The report, the most extensive survey ever conducted on public understanding of the issue, found that others blamed God for changes in weather patterns.

In a landmark decision, the government of Burkina Faso has decided to remove its water and electricity utilities from the list of state companies to be privatised. Defying the IMF, government rather decided it would be enough to restructure the companies' management.

A coalition of 140 international organizations has sent a letter to Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to demand that he immediately halt plans to build Belo Monte Dam on the Amazon's Xingu River due to its immense social and environmental impacts, and instead consider alternatives.

The concept of commodity fetishism helps explain where today's climate policies have gone wrong. In classic fetishistic fashion, "cost-saving" institutional practices have helped entrench many dangerous equivalences across society: equivalences among molecules, places, technologies and times; equivalences between offsets and emissions reductions, between biotic and fossil carbon, between hypothetical and real reductions, between fines and fees, between uncertainty and probability and so on. This illustrated powerpoint presentation diagnoses 12 examples of climate fetishism currently shaping the thoughts and behaviour of research institutions, UN climate negotiators, national governments, large corporations, physical scientists, traders and others.

Zimbabwe’s land issue has generated unprecedented debate nationally and internationally, largely polarised between supporters of radical land reform and supporters of market-oriented reforms, writes Grasian Mkodzongi. While it is ‘undeniable’ that Mugabe used land reform ‘to boost his political legitimacy’, how can one ‘justify the continued existence of a dualistic land ownership structure decades after independence, in a country whose struggle for liberation crystallised around the land issue?’, Mkodzongi asks.

Informal traders in central Mitchells Plain have clashed with police over permits. Chaos erupted in the town centre yesterday morning when nearly 100 traders reacted angrily to the arrival of metro police who said they had been instructed by city officials to remove any structures which blocked the walkways.Many traders were unsure why they were being moved, and started swearing at police as they tried desperately to hold on to their goods and belongings.

A new initiative to bring environmental and financial benefits to local communities in the impoverished highlands of Ethiopia has been announced in Ethiopia. The Humbo Assisted Natural Regeneration Project is Africa's first large-scale forestry project to be registered under the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol. It will bring both economic and social benefits to poor communities in Ethiopia as well as environmental benefits as the project will cut an estimated 880,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over the next 30 years.

Kenyan companies are missing billions of shillings in new revenue because of lack of expertise to develop projects that help reduce carbon dioxide emissions and therefore earn from the global carbon trading market. The global carbon trading market, which rewards projects that help reduce emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, is now worth estimated Sh12.5 trillion ($170 billion), according to industry data provider, Carbin Point, but only a very small fraction of this money, estimated at two per cent, is coming to Africa.

A dispute could break out between Ghana and neighbouring Ivory Coast, if immediate steps are not taken to enter into appropriate negotiations to redefine the international boundary between the two nations. Ghana's Western neighbor Ivory Coast is reportedly laying claims to portions of the huge oil wealth in the deep waters of the Western Region of Ghana.

Uganda’s members of parliament (MPs) are pressurising government to make public details of oil production-sharing agreements it signed with various international oil companies.

Conservationists are at war over a British plan to create a marine protection zone around a large chunk of surviving empire in the Indian Ocean. The zone, twice the size of Britain, would cover much of the Chagos archipelago, one of the most unspoiled coral reef systems in the world.

Ethiopia is one of the main targets in the current global farmland grab. The government has stated publicly that it wants to provide 3 million hectares of farmland in the country to foreign investors and around 1 million hectares have apparently already been signed away. Much of the land that these investors have acquired is in the province of Gambella, a fertile area that is home to the Anuak Nation.

Food security and economic growth are being undermined by the collapse of more than 90% of the farms that the government bought for restitution or redistribution to victims of apartheid. Minister of Rural Development and Land Affairs Gugile Nkwinti also warned that, while the government would invest heavily to rescue these failing farms, it would also crack down soon on foreigners buying up South African land.

Plans to transform the east African oil sector by building a pipeline from south Sudan to the Kenyan coast were boosted this week when a Japanese company expressed interest in joining the project.

Foreign investors are pouring billions of dollars into large extractive projects in the Democratic Republic of Congo, writes Peter Bosshard, but in ‘a classic case of the resource curse’, the projects ‘are not promoting the country’s long-term development’, but attracting ‘short-term profiteers, conflict, and corruption’. The World Bank’s rehabilitation of the Inga 1 and 2 hydropower dams are the latest example of this trend.

The purchase and creation of private land by external interests feature in Gado's cartoon this week.

Let the rains fail, even for several successive seasons, and Malawi should still be able to produce enough to feed itself.? This is the motivation for the country's green belt concept. It is strengthened by painful memories of the severe drought beginning early 2002 which triggered three years of hunger.

The double pressures of climate change and poverty threaten to make Africa one of the regions hardest hit by coming climate-related problems. Nowhere is that more evident than in Zimbabwe, where the urban poor already struggle to survive in a harsh economic climate.