South Africa launches a programme this week to exterminate its "national flower" -- the millions of used plastic bags that litter the landscape.

The Zimbabwe-Mozambique-Zambia (ZIMOZA) trans-boundary natural resources management initiative, the first of its kind in Southern Africa, has been officially launched in Luangwa, Zambia. Cooperation through the ZIMOZA project will secure the long term conservation of the environment and the sustainable use of natural resources in the area.

Dynamite fishing, coral mining, and the use of seine nets have destroyed much of Tanzania's coastal reefs, but now the government is getting serious about protecting these unique and fragile reefs. Tanzanian environmental experts are assessing the condition of the country's coral reefs, which are being threatened by human activities both legal and illegal.

This posting from Africa Action contains brief excerpts from two documents about the
environmental impact of Royal Dutch Shell's oil operations. One is a press release issued by groundWork South Africa. The other is a report prepared by a coalition of organisations, including Friends of the Earth International and Environmental Rights Action, Nigeria, as well as groundWork, in advance of Shell's annual general meeting last month, sections on Shell operations in Durban, South Africa and the Niger Delta, Nigeria.

Union officials were on Wednesday hoping to negotiate with Nigerian workers who have taken nearly 100 foreign oil workers hostage on offshore rigs and reportedly threatened to kill them.

International Monetary Fund (IMF) investigators are arriving in Angola on Wednesday on the trail of almost $1bn which the IMF believes vanished from state coffers in 2001 alone. The money, an internal report alleged late last year, came from oil sales, the cornerstone of Angola's foreign trade.

Access to potable water remains a critical problem in both rural Gabon and poorer suburbs of big cities. Libreville, the capital of oil-rich Gabon, is home to 600,000 people, many of whom live in its poorer suburbs with no access to clean running water.

A Durban environmentalist, Desmond D’Sa felt so opposed to a proposal by Mondi to burn waste at its Durban paper mill, that he bought a share in Mondi’s parent company Anglo American, and last week flew to London to voice his concerns at Anglo American’s London AGM.

The international community must assume its moral and legal responsibilities to help end the devastating conflict that continues to plague the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Amnesty International said in a new report. The report details the human cost of the conflict and underscores the exploitation of the DRC's natural resources as the biggest single factor perpetuating violence in the country.

A coalition of animal rights and wildlife preservation groups claimed Tuesday that they had blocked - at least temporarily - two U.S. zoos from importing African elephants from a Swaziland preserve.

You would have to be brave, foolish, or very hungry to eat the fish that God's Time is catching in his net. "I catch up to 1,000 fish sometimes," said God's Time, whose curious name is not uncommon in these parts, as he reached into a jerry can tied to his waist and pulled out a small bream. Environmentalists say there are few ways that the state has failed the people of Nigeria's oil-rich southeast more than the mess that has been made of the ecosystems in one of the world's great patches of mangrove forest.

When Johannesburg Water started installing pre-paid water meters in their community in the weeks running up to the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), residents of Orange Farm in South Africa got a taste of today's conception of "sustainability": privatization of basic services, cost recovery policies, and tariff increases. For the one and a half million people living in Orange Farm, an informal settlement 50km south of Johannesburg where unemployment reaches 80 percent, these policies mean cut-offs and evictions. A harsh reality for an increasing number of people in the new, neoliberal South Africa.

The Swaziland Environmental Authority (SEA) has surprised environmentalists by threatening to shut down one of the country's oldest industries for dumping toxic waste into an important river. "We thought the SEA was just a ploy by government to give the appearance of caring about environmental issues, that in fact it would be as ineffective as government's Anti-Corruption Unit, which does nothing to deter government malfeasance," said Mbongeni Lukhele of the environmental group Great Cross.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has expressed great concern over the deteriorating press freedom climate in Cameroon following the detention of three journalists from Cameroon's only independent daily, "Mutations", and the closure of the private radio station Magic FM.

This concept note discusses the meaning of conservation. The author argues that conservation tends to carry with it a meaning of stasis or preservation of the norm. But, she argues, what is the norm, which point of the constantly changing history of the earth do we choose to conserve? The author argues that defining and limiting sustainable use, for our and future generations, is impossible since we cannot tell what is sustainable resource use now or what the requirements of the future will be. The natural world is a dynamic, ever-changing place, even in the absence of human intervention. The challenge is to preserve the dynamism of a natural world in which humans are relative newcomers.

Korogocho means heap of scrap in Kikuyu and the slum in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, lives up to its sorry name. Scrawny chickens peck and barefoot children play in the debris of plastic and refuse. People scavenging through the piles of rubbish on the city dump bring back faded umbrellas, discarded toilet brushes and scraps of metal to resell. About 160,000 people live in this warren of low shacks cobbled together with bits of tin and slabs of mud. Few have electricity or fuel to cook with, but the biggest problem is water and sanitation. Nairobi is a scarce water city – like a host of others in Africa including Addis Ababa, Dakar and Lusaka.

A month into one of France's biggest ever corruption trials, an avid public has gorged on a rich diet of African bribes, political skullduggery and sensational divorce -- all paid for from the illicit millions of the formerly state-owned oil company Elf. Days of cross-questioning of defendants and witnesses at the criminal court in Paris have provided a feast of insights into the extraordinary profligacy practiced in the early 1990s at the top of one of the country's biggest enterprises -- with the knowledge and collusion of the political elite.

The government of Tanzania has joined other Indian Ocean countries to launch a National Integrated Coastal Management Strategy that will strive to improve the living standard of the coastal people and revamp national development. The strategy is a joint initiative between the Tanzanian National Environmental Management Council, the University of Rhode Island Coastal Resource Center, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). It was developed following years of community consultation and input.

Royal Dutch Shell’s recent concurrent annual general meetings in The Hague and London were attended by activists from communities neighbouring Shell facilities around the world. Local community based organisations from around the world recently decided to buy single shares in this multi-national corporation in order to gain direct access to Shell shareholders with the hope of raising awareness of the environmental destruction and human suffering Shell is causing worldwide.

The Environmental Information Network (EIN) Project in Ghana uses ICT to link the databases of national environmental agencies. The network system is publicly available for free use. Local and international researchers, government agencies and other environmental organisations can use its information to support decision-making, intervention strategies, and awareness campaigns about environmental protection, and they can also contribute to this knowledge pool.