One of Botswana’s senior officials has argued that the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR), the ancestral home of the Gana and Gwi Bushmen, ‘should be reserved for wildlife’, despite the fact that the country’s High Court has ruled that the Bushmen have the right to live there.

A reform programme designed to formalise customary land rights in Côte d’Ivoire may compromise durable solutions for internally displaced persons (IDPs) if their specific needs are not taken into account, according to a new report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC.

This paper summarises the key issues that need to be resolved if the Copenhagen Climate Conference is to succeed. They include the future of the Kyoto Protocol, the global climate regime, the emission cuts of developed countries, the attempts to shift responsibiity to developing countries, finance and technology for developing countries, and the danger of climate trade protectionism.

African experts and ministers responsible for hydrocarbons are gathering in Ethiopia to craft key documents in the energy sector, the AU has disclosed.

Non-governmental organisations attending the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, on Tuesday slammed the leaked draft Copenhagen Climate Change agreement proposed by the Danish Prime Minister Lars Rasmussen.

Industrial agriculture is the skeleton in the closet of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). If we consider production, processing and transportation, the whole food chain could be responsible for up to half of all global greenhouse gas emissions (1).

The major IFIs have appealed to the governments meeting at Copenhagen to come to a comprehensive agreement on climate change mitigation, pledging to use their own resources to contribute. Some are critical, however, of how ready these institutions are to tackle the issues involved.

The discovery of oil in Chad was supposed to allieviate poverty and human suffering, but it's only enriched Western Oil companies and the local dictators.

Kenyan farmers are concerned about climate change as they see crop production decrease because of rising temperatures, unreliable rainfall, soil erosion and drought.

A group of Nigerian farmers is suing Royal Dutch Shell, claiming that the oil firm polluted their land in the Niger Delta region. The four farmers allege that oil spilt from the supply lines of a subsidiary of Shell contaminated fish ponds and farms, ruining villagers' livelihoods.

As the Oromo Liberation Front has repeatedly stressed, the current Ethiopian regime has, since it came to power in 1991, dispossessed, displaced, and disenfranchised tens of thousands of the Oromo people. TPLF’s policies of dispossession and marginalization of the Oromo nation have remained at the root of today’s underdevelopment and the spectacle of mass starvation that has been witnessed throughout Oromia in recent years.

As African countries attract foreign investors looking to rent agricultural land, a group of civil societies who met in Addis Ababa has called on African leaders to reject what they call the “corporate takeover of African land for food production”.

The rich are swindling the poor in the DRC and Zimbabwe, and no one seems to be in charge of a rudderless Nigeria, writes Sokari Ekine in this week’s roundup of the African blogosphere.

The causes of world’s ecological crisis can be traced to capitalism, Trevor Ngwane writes in this week’s Pambazuka News, but socialism still needs to give greater weight to environmental considerations – not least because it is the working class which is most vulnerable to the negative impacts of the crisis.

In Mali the government has approved long-term leases for outside investors to develop more than 160,000 hectares of land. Government officials say the country could not develop its cultivable land otherwise, but local farmers say they fear being pushed out.

It appears that former president Moi’s tenure at Kiptagich 900 hectares in the Mau may be ending soon. Writing in the Standard on Sunday newspaper, Juma Kwayera claims that the Prime Minister Raila Odinga’s communications office issued a despatch as follows: “On Monday we are sending emissaries to Moi to surrender the Kiptagich Tea Plantation or we take it by force.”

Resource-rich Angola was once known as the scene of Africa's longest-running civil war. Today, life expectancy hovers around 44 years — not unlike that of an average Briton living in the 1800s. Over 70% of the population lives in poverty, and the country has one of the highest child mortality rates in the world. And the nation's lifetime dictator of 30 years, Jose Dos Santos, leader of the liberation-party-turned-permanent-government, the MPLA, does not appear to have lost his lust for the throne.

With the worsening of the global food crisis, general international agreement has emerged regarding the importance of smallholder agriculture in the battle against hunger and poverty. However, public debate has been highly restricted and increasingly dominated by conventional, market-led, and corporate approaches to aid and agricultural development.

The Copenhagen summit is set to begin, and all the preparations should have been completed - most of all, a draft of the final outcome. Instead, it seems the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change are further apart than they had been, two years ago when the Bali Action Plan, was launched.

The Story of Cap and Trade is a fast-paced, fact-filled, entertaining look at the leading climate mitigation strategy being imposed by elites at the Copenhagen summit and in Washington and most other capitals and financial centers. Host Annie Leonard introduces the people at the heart of this scheme - energy traders and Wall Street financiers.