An age-old battle rages between the environment and the economy, with the environment often losing out to economic development. But projects in Lake Malawi National Park and Mlambe Natural Resource Management show that environmental preservation can also be economically profitable.

What are the environmental challenges facing an urbanising world? Who bears the environmental costs in cities? International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) research suggests that environmental problems become particularly serious where there is a rapid expansion in urban population and production with little or no consideration for the environmental implications or no government capacity to act on these.

Over 50 communities in Takai and Albasu Local Government Areas of Kano State are presently threatened by massive erosion which has already cut off their access to major markets in the area.

The Nkoranza District Assembly is to develop the monkey sanctuaries at Fiema and Boabeng to boost eco-tourism, making the area a "gate-way" to the development of the District.

Africa's forest cover has reduced by 30 percent in the last 30 years causing climate change, danger to tourism and human welfare, the Africa Environment Outlook report has revealed. President Yoweri Museveni launched the report recently. It also indicates that 126 animal and 123 plant species have become extinct and 2,018 animal and 1,771 plant species are threatened by extinction.

Plans for a titanium mine in southeast Kenya, approved by the Kenyan government last week, could lead to environmental damage and adversely affect the lives of people, local rights groups warned on Tuesday.

In The Devil That Danced on the Water , Aminatta Forna writes about the first ten years of her life and the last ten years of her father’s, each distorted by the turmoil of West African, post-independence politics.

Each of the some 60,000 people expected to attend the World Summit on Sustainable Development taking place in South Africa later this summer will generate greenhouse gas emissions.South African officials will compensate for these emissions, and conference participants can help.

Ten rare crocodiles were seized at London's Heathrow Airport on Sunday from the cargo hold of a plane en route from Nigeria to South Korea. The African dwarf crocodiles, which are an endangered species, were intercepted by customs officers on a stopover.

At a time when the petropolitics of the Bush administration seem to reign supreme, the rights of peoples affected by the global hunt for oil have received an important boost. An African commission has ruled the Nigerian government should compensate the Ogoni people for abuses against their lands, environment, housing, and health caused by oil production and government security forces. Nigerian and international groups say that the ruling by the nine-member African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights (ACHPR) is a sweeping affirmation of what the human rights community calls ESC rights--defined by the UN's International Covenant on Economic, Social, and, Cultural Rights.

The commission called on Nigeria to undertake a "comprehensive cleanup of lands and rivers damaged by oil operations." It must also ensure that the social and environmental impact of future oil development on its territory does not harm local communities.

Human rights groups are hailing the commission's decision as a major breakthrough in the battle for international recognition of ESC rights, which have long been given lesser status--particularly by Western countries--than political and civil rights. "This is the first decision by the African Commission to specifically and comprehensively address violations of economic and social and cultural rights under the Africa Charter," said Felix Morka, director of the Lagos-based Social and Economic Rights Actions Centre (SERAC), which launched the case against the military regime of Gen. Sani Abacha in 1996. Morka observed that the recent ruling was the strongest and most articulate statement on the validity and enforceability of economic and social rights emanating from any intergovernmental human rights body.

"It is a remarkable decision indeed," said Bronwen Manby, a Nigeria specialist at the London office of Human Rights Watch (HRW). "The very fact that it's a decision by the African Commission--which is a body of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and appointed by governments--means that it will certainly form a part of the body of international jurisprudence on economic and social rights."

The case was filed shortly after the execution in November 1995 of nine leaders of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), including the world-renowned playwright and author, Ken Saro-wiwa. MOSOP and Saro-wiwa had led a global campaign to publicize the plight of the Ogonis, a minority in the oil-rich Niger Delta region, whose lands and rivers had been polluted for years as a result of operations by Shell Petroleum Development Corporations, the area's largest foreign oil producer, and the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC). Protests by the Ogoni, especially in the early 1990s, were met with fierce military repression, including what one internal government memo called "wasting operations" against Ogoni villages and suspected MOSOP activists. Scores of people were killed and their property looted and burned.

After the 1995 executions, Shell became a target of an international consumer boycott, while a number of Western countries slapped diplomatic and other sanctions on the military regime, most of which lifted only after the return of civilian rule in 1999 when retired Gen. Obusegun Obasanjo won elections. Apart from one submission that confirmed the main allegations filed by SERAC, the Obasanjo government did not participate in the case, forcing the Commission to conclude that Nigerian courts were not prepared to act on the plaintiffs' case. Although the judgement was communicated to the government early last month, Abuja has not yet reacted officially.

The decision, which runs 14 pages, asserts that the government violated seven articles of the 1981 African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, to which Nigeria is a signatory. They included the rights: "to enjoy the best attainable state of physical and mental health," "to a general satisfactory environment favorable to [the peoples'] development," and to "freely dispose of their wealth and natural resources."

According to the ruling, "By any measure of standards, its practice falls short of the minimum conduct expected of governments." In a direct reference to the role of the oil corporations, the commission observed: "The intervention of multinational corporations may be a potentially positive force for development if the State and the people concerned are ever mindful of the common good and the sacred rights of individuals and communities."

The decision is important for people throughout the world who suffer from corporate practices, said Roger Normand, director of the New York-based Center for Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (CESR), which co-sponsored the case with SERAC.

"I believe that this can serve as a precedent not only throughout Africa, but also for all similar efforts to hold governments accountable for gross human rights violations linked to abusive corporate practices," he added. Normand and others also agreed with Morka that the decision is the strongest affirmation to date by an inter-governmental body of ESC rights. Despite their inclusion in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this family of rights have tended to be given second-class status by the West, including Western-based human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

Western nations agreed most recently at the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna that all rights in the Universal Declaration are indivisible and interdependent, however, "for most of the past 50 years, these rights were totally neglected by governments and human rights NGOs," according to Larry Cox, senior program officer for international human rights at the New York-based Ford Foundation. "But in the last five years, we've seen the beginning of real momentum on these rights, led first and foremost by groups in the Global South who are in many ways the most adversely affected by the lack of such rights," he noted. "That's the history of the human rights movement: people who make these rights real are the victims who are fighting for them."

Although the U.S. government has long agreed that all of the rights included in the Universal Declaration are indivisible and interdependent, Washington has tended to treat economic and social rights more as privileges than as core rights. Indeed, the State Department's annual human rights country reports do not explicitly cover economic and social rights. In that respect, said Normand, the African Commission's decision "is moving ahead of western standards in the protection of economic, social, and cultural rights--an important achievement for Africa, but an example for the rest of the world."

The smokestacks of North American and European factories may have spawned the devastating droughts that killed millions of people in Ethiopia and other parts of the Sahel region of Africa.
Scientists have been puzzled about the source of the 40-year dry spell, among the most severe in recorded history. Now a global climate model developed by Leon Rotstayn of CSIRO Australia and Ulrike Lohmann of Dalhousie University in Canada appears to link the two phenomena.

The Copperbelt Indian business community has donated medicines worth k10 million and 60 blankets to the Maureen Mwanawasa community initiative (MMCI).

Just down the road from the wealthy Johannesburg suburb of Sandton, home to the World Summit on Sustainable Development 2002 venue, a human and environmental tragedy is being played out that has nothing to do with sustainability and everything to do with big business’ push for profits at any cost. Though just a few miles from Sandton, Alexandra is not a wealthy suburb. It could fairly be called a shanty-town; a settlement of largely self-built homes of poor black Africans, hardly changed since the apartheid era, where unemployment and AIDS are rife. Some of the homes have mains water, but since the city’s water services were sold off to French-based multinational Suez (formerly Suez Lyonnaise) the bills have tripled and many people can no longer afford to keep the water flowing.

The formerly thick forests of The Gambia have been degraded and reduced during the last century because of large-scale destruction through bush fire, exploitation of forestry resources and cultivation. Because of this development, the government reacted in the early eighties in the western parts of the country through the Gambian-German Forestry Project (GGFP) and in 1996 a forestry project was started.

The ecological situation in Nigeria will make life unbearable for future generations if an adequate and systematic approach to land degradation is not seriously tackled, Governor Umar Musa Yar'Adua of Katsina State said during the launching of the state "Operation Keep Katsina Clean."

Hard hit by insufficient rainfall, Burkina Faso launched on Tuesday "Operation Saaga" in which it is using two planes to drop chemicals into the clouds to induce rain. "Saaga" means rain in local languages.

Humanity is heading for a sharp drop in living standards by the middle of the century unless it stops its massive depletion of the Earth's natural resources, according to a report issued Tuesday. Titled "Living Planet Report 2002," the study said there was so much pressure on water supplies, forests, land, and energy sources that within 150 years the planet's riches could be exhausted and temperatures pushed inexorably upwards. WWF figures show while rich nations draw heavily on Earth's resources, people in poor African states eke out an existence without using all that is available to them within their national borders.

The Ethiopian wolf - one of the rarest animals in the world - is being threatened by farmers using poisons to protect their livestock, campaigners told IRIN on Monday. It is the first time that the wolves, listed by the World Conservation Union as "critically endangered", have been killed as a result of poisoning. Conservationists blame poison for wiping out most other wildlife in the country, such as lions.

Africans are likely to suffer increasing pollution, ill-health, and loss of farmland unless the continent adopts "clean" technologies and the world does more to fight global warming, the United Nations said last Thursday. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), releasing what it called the most authoritative assessment of Africa's environment ever produced, said many African countries were trying hard to protect their farms, coasts, jungles, and deserts.

There is probably no park where authorities and communities are not at loggerheads. Wild animals, which raid the villager's crops are always provoking conflict. However, Kibaale National Park in Western Uganda has made a giant leap to overcome the crop raiders.