Africa’s position at climate change negotiations is unified and strong, and in fact, as a region, Africa is “probably the most unified”, Department of Environmental Affairs International Cooperation DDG Alf Wills has said. Wills said that developing countries, in general, are unified on the science of climate change. He agrees that the historical responsibility of climate change lies with the developed world, but in terms of the finer details and priority areas of focus, developing countries remain divided.

Zimbabwe has failed to remove its armed forces from the diamond fields in Marange and to end related human rights abuses there, Human Rights Watch has said. As a result, the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS) should suspend Zimbabwe immediately. The KPCS, an international group governing the global diamond industry, sent a review mission to Marange in late June 2009 to assess Zimbabwe's compliance with the group's standards, which require diamonds to be lawfully mined, documented, and exported by participant countries.

Six Botswana bushmen found guilty of hunting without a permit on their ancestral land have been set free with a caution, a lobby group says. Survival International said the "attempt by the Botswana government to punish Bushmen for hunting to feed their families has backfired". The San bushmen of the Kalahari have faced years of legal rows for the right to live on their ancestral lands.

One thing that is very, very notable about the contentions over the Mau, particularly whether and when to evict, or not and why, is the absence of law-based arguments. The occupiers of the moral high grounds, those who have mounted the high horse, carefully avoid the law. They speak as though it actually does not exist. It is as if there are no land laws that can be used to determine various claims. And that ought to make people quite curious indeed.

Gabon is a sparsely populated country covered mostly in rainforest – just 1½ million people live here. That, and the fact that oil wealth has made per capita income higher in Gabon than most other African countries, are some of the reasons why its natural wonders are so well preserved. But the oil is running out and the government has started selling other mineral resources to foreign investors, which means destroying large tracts of forest.

Burkina Faso’s first plastic recycling centre is paving the way for a new kind of development project. It provides a money earner to the poor while tackling environmental pollution. Local industry also benefits – the recycled plastic granules cost half the price of importing new plastic from abroad.

As the change in climate is witnessed all over the world, the Congo Basin’s rate of deforestation is being debated as the loss of trees is leading to the destruction of essential animal and tribal habitats at an increasing rate and a large amount of carbon dioxide is remaining in the atmosphere unchanged.

Six Kalahari Bushmen in Botswana have been arrested and jailed, charged with hunting inside the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. The Molepolole court is expected to rule on the charges on Monday. The case relates to two incidents, one earlier this year and the other in 2007.

Governments and investment funds are buying up farmland in Africa and Asia to grow food -- a profitable business, with a growing global population and rapidly rising prices. The high-stakes game of real-life Monopoly is leading to a modern colonialism to which many poor countries submit out of necessity.

Egypt receives some of the highest annual solar radiation in the world, yet the desert country remains heavily dependent on fossil fuels. "There is a lot of unachieved potential here," says Amr Mohsen, chairman and CEO of Lotus Solar Technologies, an Egyptian firm specialising in solar applications. "The sun is not only strong, but you have everything you need to produce the cheapest kilowatt hour in the region."

When the film Blood Diamond came out in 2006, people were startled at the alleged origins of the precious stones from areas of bloody conflict and began asking whether the jewels on their fingers cost a human life. Will consumers soon find themselves asking similar questions about their cell phones and computers?

Africa's most marginalised communities will be able to share their experiences of adapting to climate change thanks to a new fund that seeks to promote knowledge sharing across the continent. AfricaAdapt, a network set up in May to aid the flow of information between stakeholders, launched a Knowledge Sharing Innovation Fund last month (16 June), offering grants of up to US$10,000 to projects testing new ways of sharing knowledge, such as theatre performances and radio broadcasts.

The construction of a two billion dollar dam in Metolong, some 35 kilometres outside of Lesotho’s capital Maseru, is being welcomed by people in and around the city who will gain access to clean and safe drinking water when construction is completed in 2013. But for 250 rural families who will lose access to land and natural resources - some will be forced to relocate to make way for roads, power lines and other infrastructural development during construction - the dam is bad news.

Nigeria's gas flare-out date has once again been extended - this time to 2011. The decision follows 25 years of political procrastination by the federal government and illegal behaviour on the part of major oil multinationals engaged in flaring associated gas (AG), the byproduct of oil production in the Niger Delta.

Aid agencies in Somalia are appealing for $11 million to provide the hundreds of people displaced by fighting in the capital with emergency water and sanitation programmes, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has reported. Over 200,000 people have fled Mogadishu since fighting broke out between the Government and the opposition Al-Shabab and Hisb-ul-Islam groups in early May, in what the UN refugee agency has described as the biggest exodus from the capital since Ethiopian forces intervened in Somalia in 2007.

Mauritius appears to have a happy problem with the 400,000 tons of waste it produces each year. The island's only landfill is full and the government must decide whether to turn to incinerating waste - generating electricity in the process - or to compost it, to the benefit of farmers.

The US is increasingly reliant on oil from West Africa for its daily energy needs and forecasts that up to 25 per cent of imports will hail from the Gulf of Guinea by 2015. Ghana, which discovered oil offshore only recently, is set to become a producer next year. Some Ghanaians say Barack Obama’s choice of the country for his first presidential visit to sub-Saharan Africa was partly related to ambitions to ensure an interest in the country’s estimated 3-4bn barrel reserves.

After a 50-year wait, thousands of Kenyans in Central Province have received the most coveted asset in the country – a piece of land. The move is not only good news for those allocated the land but for the country as a whole as the move will boost food security when the recipients start farming wheat, beans, maize and livestock on the 6,070ha.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report has revealed that six of Africa’s regions will be unable to grow maize by 2050 as growing seasons get hotter that normal even if the carbon emissions are dramatically reduced. The six countries, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Sierra Leone which most of them are in Sahel, according to the researchers may have nowhere to turn as few countries currently experience their extremely hot projected climates.

Climate change in Malawi interacts with environmental degradation, notably deforestation, and it is women who suffer most. Women have multiple roles as farmers and bringers of water and firewood and so depend very directly on natural resources. At the same time their position in society means that generally they have less access to income and credit and little or no voice in decision making. That resulting increased vulnerability feeds the spread of HIV and AIDS, for example if women resort to selling sex for food during the hungry months before the harvest. This Oxfam report details the impact of climate change on livelihoods in Malawi, and outlines the ways in which people are adapting to these changes.