Ten thousand families in Ewaso Narok settlement in Laikipia have resolved to sue the government over its eviction order. The families, which were settled there by the government in 2000, were recently directed to move out by Chief Conservator of Forests M.W. Muniu. The government says the allocation was an illegal encroachment on forest land.

With a generating capacity of more than 40,000 MW, South Africa-based Eskom is Africa’s largest energy utility, and ranks as one of the top five energy utilities in the world. Eskom is a de facto monopoly in South Africa, and also generates over half the electricity produced in the whole of Africa, with operations in 31 countries on the continent. Because of its heavy reliance on coal, it is the primary source of greenhouse gas emissions in South Africa. Eskom management has also stated that it intends to rely increasingly on nuclear power. And in recent years, Eskom has begun to promote new dams and buy existing hydropower plants around the continent as it seeks to expand its influence across Africa. This paper explores the company's social and ecological footprint across Africa.

Gracelino is dressed in dirty rags. He extends his skinny arm into his pocket and produces a small plastic bottle filled with a see-through liquid. This is gasoline which he bought for $1 at a market, and there is enough here to last him for up to three days. "You put the petrol onto a piece of cloth and sniff it. It makes me feel high, but I know it's no good for me and so I'm going to stop doing it," says the 15-year-old. Gracelino is one of many street children who are addicted to a by-product of the very substance that makes Angola so rich in one of the world's most sought-after resources.

The proposed building of a massive dam to supply electricity for Namibia has met with fierce resistance from both environmental groups and local tribes. The proposed Epupa dam project - to be built on the Kunene river in the north-west of the country - would dramatically alter the environment by flooding a vast expanse of the region.

Inhabitants of an oil rich country, Nigerians have had to resort to using wood for fuel due to the increase in price of petroleum products. When the Nigerian government on June 20 suddenly increased the prices of petroleum products such as petrol, diesel and the commonly used kerosene by about 50 percent, it was a decision with far reaching effects. Nigerian environmental groups say that massive deforestation of the nation’s severely depleted forest may follow if the fuel price increase is not reversed.

Activists from the Mozambican environmentalist NGO "Livaningo" staged a demonstration on Monday in front of the World Bank offices in Maputo, to protest against the bank's support for the building of incinerators to burn toxic waste in developing countries, reports Tuesday's issue of the daily paper "Noticias".

In the face of looming water shortages, which threaten to affect billions of the earth’s inhabitants by mid-century, UNESCO is calling for a radical review and reform of water education programmes and for a speedy doubling in the number of water professionals around the world. This call is contained in a speech that the Director-General of UNESCO, Koïchiro Matsuura, will deliver on Thursday July 17.

Solar power holds great potential as a source of clean, renewable energy for Africa, but turning that potential into reality requires effective marketing and financing of solar photovoltaic (PV) — solar panel — installations, combined with viable business models. Experts from 15 solar programmes in 13 countries took part in a workshop in Pretoria, South Africa, recently that focused on these elements for success.

The last decade has witnessed the emergence of an array of increasingly vibrant movements to harness science and technology in the quest for a transition toward sustainability. These movements take as their point of departure a widely shared view that the challenge of sustainable development is the reconciliation of society's development goals with the planet's environmental limits over the long term.

Chad, one of the world's poorest countries, is set to join the elite club of oil-producing nations Tuesday as black gold begins flowing into a pipeline towards a terminal in the Atlantic Ocean off Cameroon. The multi-billion dollar project, co-funded by the World Bank and a consortium of oil companies led by ExxonMobil, is expected to generate up to 250,000 barrels of oil a day when it reaches full operating capacity. But promises of riches for the landlocked desert country of eight million, where per capita income is well under a dollar a day, have met with scepticism among environmental and human rights groups, as well as opposition groups who fear that little of the newfound oil wealth will trickle down to the poor.

An animal rights coalition filed a lawsuit last Thursday aimed at stopping the import of 11 African elephants to two U.S. zoos. The Save Wild Elephants Coalition, which has been fighting for months to keep the elephants in their natural habitat in Africa, filed suit in federal court in Washington, D.C., challenging permits issued this week by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

A landmark report released last week calls for fundamental changes in how decisions are made concerning the world’s natural resources. The report, World Resources 2002-2004: Decisions for the Earth – Balance, Voice, and Power, stresses the urgent need for such changes to arrest the accelerating deterioration of the world’s environment and to address the crisis of global poverty.

In Mozambique, unsafe water and poor sanitation is killing almost 55 children every day. The country has one of the highest child mortality rates in the world: 246 out of every 1000 live births die within their first five years. Thirteen per cent of these deaths are directly attributable to a lack of access to clean water, proper sanitation and poor hygiene practices, says Unicef.

The sending of French and British soldiers to the DRC, where the most modest estimates suggest that around three and a half million people have died as a result of war in the last five years, has received little comment. Yet the question remains: has the problem of the Congo been too much intervention, or too little? The Congolese state has been bankrupted by the costs of war. The people survive in conditions of desperate poverty. Successive outside players have done nothing to encourage self-government or even the conditions in which democracy could grow. The arrival of the French troops has been met therefore with cynicism.

Extinction of the unique Gourma elephants "is a real possibility if conditions don't change soon," Vicki Huddleston, U.S. Ambassador to Mali, warned in a June 18 interview with the U.S. State Department International Information Program. If the international community does not join with the Malian government now to prevent their ranges from being taken over by human settlements, these beautiful creatures will die, she said.

Any attempt to extract heavy minerals from the dunes along the Eastern Cape's Pondoland coast will be massively destructive and according to one South African expert, such mining operations typically wipe out everything in their path. University of Natal geologist Dr Ron Uken says in terms of the environment, mining coastal dunes for titanium minerals such as ilmenite and rutile "leaves nothing".

The environmental non-governmental organisation Earthlife Africa says it is to press ahead with a high court challenge to Eskom's proposed pebble bed nuclear reactor. Eskom has applied to the Department of Environmental Affairs for permission to construct a demonstration module at Koeberg near Cape Town.

President Bush's Africa trip next week provides a rare opportunity to put the continent's pressing problems at the top of the international agenda. Africa needs more help than the United States can or is willing to offer. And this visit, like other presidents' trips to the region, is not likely to dramatically change the situation for the impoverished continent. But there is at least one gesture Bush can make that would have a positive effect on Africans, and it wouldn't cost U.S. taxpayers a penny. He can lean on Big Oil to clean up its role in the region's corrosive corruption.

With rebel forces at the gates of Monrovia, Liberia's capital, and eastern parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo beset by feuding militias, there is little sign of an end to Africa's conflicts. So it is all the more surprising, on the face of it, that a United Nations-backed initiative should appear to be on the verge of legitimising the "official" trade in diamonds that many fear can easily be subverted to help support civil wars. In many African countries, diamond production is in the hands of artisan miners, with little or no regulation. The flow of diamonds - a small but high-value commodity that is easily hidden, transported and smuggled - was always seen as almost impossible to control.

Environmentalists are calling it “the invasion of the invasives.” Non-indigenous plant species brought to Southern Africa are alarming conservationists by the way they are taking over the habitats of native plants and, in some cases, causing indigenous species to become endangered.