Traditional healers and South African hunter-gatherers have long known that the root of the plant Pelargonium reniforme can cure stomach ailments. But the unsustainable and indiscriminate removal of indigenous plants, such as Pelargonium, and the export of these plants abroad, is threatening their survival. New laws are needed to protect traditional knowledge and indigenous plants in South Africa — and to allow Africa to harness its biodiversity for Africa.

Over the next 20 years some 60 million people in northern Africa are expected to leave the Sahelian region if desertification there is not halted, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said. June 17 is the day set aside each year by the UN as World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought, twin problems that must be solved if world hunger is to be relieved, Annan said.

A three-day conference on the protection and development of the coastal and marine environment in sub-Saharan Africa opened in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, on Monday.

Scientists in Australia and Canada say that pollution from western countries may have caused the droughts which ravaged Africa's Sahel region in the 1970s and 1980s. Other Sahelian countries, from Senegal in the west stretching east to the Red Sea, were also devastated by the lack of rain and the southwards spread of the Sahara desert. The research says that sulphur dioxide from factories in Europe and the United States has cooled the Northern Hemisphere, driving the tropical rain belt south away from the Sahel.

Almost half of Africans have no access to clean running water, an international conference in Addis Ababa heard last week. Some 300 million people on the continent also have no access to sanitation facilities, a conference held by the Water and Sanitation Programme (WSP) was told. It means that millions of people are at risk from serious diseases and infections such as cholera and dysentery.

The sustained conflict in the Mano River countries of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone has created one of the most severe humanitarian crises in the world, and strained political and economic relations between the three states, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) says in a new report.

Nearly half of Africa's population of 325 million people is threatened by desertification. When combined with extreme poverty and severe land degradation, the threat acutely affects millions of Africans, a panel of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) has reported.

A Nigerian NGO, the Environmental Impact Monitor (EIM), has voiced concern about plans for a floating production, storage and offloading vessel designed to be stationed in Nigerian waters for continuous oil processing for 20 years.

A senior official in the Ministry of Environment and Tourism says climate change and unsustainable use of resources are creating major challenges for Namibia. Speaking at the official launch of the World Environmental Day in Windhoek Under Secretary in the Department of Natural Resources, Maria Kapere, said climate changes in Namibia will force changes in the distribution of species and habitats along Namibia's escarpment where most of the country's unique species occur.

The prospects are dwindling fast that any significant international agreement will emerge from the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), which takes place in Johannesburg later this year. In one sense, science could in principle be a beneficiary of the political deadlock; as political leaders look around for issues on which they can agree, the importance of science and technology in achieving sustainable development is an obvious and attractive one.

While industrial products like chlorofluorocarbons are largely responsible for current ozone depletion, a NASA study finds that by the 2030s climate change may surpass chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as the main driver of overall ozone loss.

Pretoria-based Professor Wouter van Hoven, who is undertaking the world's largest elephant restocking programme in Angola, is perhaps best known as a modern-day Noah. His Operation Noah's Ark will culminate in June 2003 when 150 elephants are captured in Botswana and South Africa. They will be transported by road to Walvis Bay and, with 150 other mammals from 12 species, will be loaded on to a South African Navy ship and taken by road to the Kissama National Park, 75km south of Luanda.

The Bush administration's Environmental Protection Agency released a report last week, quietly and without any fanfare, acknowledging that global warming not only exists, but that it has us on a path to certain disaster. The EPA even offered a solution - get used to it.

the Johannesburg Summit is sinking in a sea of indecision and intransigence. The question the world is asking is – how did the governments let us down? Was it incompetence or was it sabotage? Hardly any country can leave Bali without embarrassment. The list of guilty parties is a long one, but it starts with the three who shamelessly hijacked the process in Bali: the United States, Australia and Canada. They are abandoning their responsibilities to their citizens and to poor people across the world.

The fourth and final preparatory meeting for the Earth Summit has ended in Bali with no final agreement - abandoning the planet on the road to ruin, says Friends of the Earth.

Equatorial Guinea's ecology is under threat in the long term, observers warn, because of the abusive felling of trees and possible marine contamination.

Of the myriad issues on the table for a U.N. summit in August that aims to cut world poverty and save the environment,few are as critical as getting safe drinking water to the 1.1 billion people who go without it. The European Union has warned the world was in a global water crisis and made the issue a priority for the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg and also at final preparatory talks here on Indonesia's resort island of Bali.

The Zimbabwe government is to investigate allegations that cabinet ministers, officials from the ruling ZANU-PF and war veterans have extorted millions of dollars from white commercial farmers to avoid eviction or the sale of their land.

Since 1999, land invasions of white-owned farms in Zimbabwe have highlighted the need for land reform in Zimbabwe. The implications of these invasions have been felt throughout Southern Africa, notably in South Africa, where a highly racially skewed distribution of land still exists today. The land question has re-emerged in South Africa today as a top priority. The idea of land invasions has captured the imaginations of a broad range of South African society, with many warning that land invasions are inevitable if land reform does not speed up. A research project being carried out by Harriet Geary-Jones at the University of Leeds, under the supervision of Rachel Slater, focuses on the land question in Southern Africa. The main aim is to undertake a comparative analysis of the land issue in Zimbabwe and South Africa in order to ascertain whether land invasions will happen in South Africa as they have in Zimbabwe. A secondary, but important aim is to assess the potential of the internet as a research tool for interviewing and the use of a discussion forum for generating ideas. How far is it possible for us to answer questions about the land issue in Southern Africa using the internet, when so many South Africans and Zimbabweans do not have access to the internet? How can one achieve a high response rate to e-mailed questionairres? As a launch pad for discussion plaease refer to arguments put forward in the Daily Mail and Guardian (May 5th, 2000) by Ben Cousins from the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape. We hope that this forum will offer the opportunity to voice their opinion on the land issue in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Any comments and contributions are greatly appreciated.

Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) has called on governments to rescue the Earth Summit negotiations taking place in Bali, Indonesia. Governments have been watering down the few meaningful targets and timetables still on the table at the Fourth Preparatory Meeting for the Earth Summit and are not making enough financial resources available for achieving sustainability, says FoEI.