Environment

Tanzania evicting tens of thousands of Maasai: HRW

Tanzania is forcibly evicting tens of thousands of Maasai from their ancestral lands, Human Rights Watch said in a report on Wednesday, claiming that government rangers beat some members of the community with impunity. Long-standing tensions between the authorities and the nomadic community have sometimes resulted in deadly clashes, after the government launched a programme beginning in 2022 to relocate some 82,000 people from the world-renowned Ngorongoro […]

31 July, 2024

Environment

UN chief calls for cooperation on heat wave impact

The United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres is calling for an urgent and concerted effort to strengthen international cooperation to address extreme heat. Guterres says extreme heat is increasingly tearing through economies, widening inequalities, undermining the Sustainable Development Goals and killing people.

30 July, 2024

Environment

African archaeology has neglected Namibia’s deserts, but scientists now know when an ancient lake supported human life in the Namib Sand Sea

The Narabeb site showing location of former lake. Abi Stone, Author provided By Abi Stone, University of Manchester and Dominic Stratford, University of the Witwatersrand Desert regions in northern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula have been well studied by archaeologists as the home of early humans and as routes of migration along “green corridors”. The archaeology of southern Africa’s west coast desert belt has not received the […]

30 July, 2024

Africa

Fossil algae show a lake once existed on Lesotho’s Mafadi summit but it vanished about 150 years ago

By Jennifer Fitchett, University of the Witwatersrand and Anson Mackay, UCL Lesotho is a small, land-locked, mountainous country located in the middle of South Africa. Its Eastern Lesotho Highlands are often referred to as the region’s “water tower” because they receive some of the highest rainfall amounts in southern Africa, providing water to South Africa and electricity to Lesotho through the Lesotho Highlands Water […]

29 July, 2024

Environment

Hippos don’t fly – but the massive animals can get airborne

Unlike the birds that often share their space, hippos can’t fly. Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket By John R. Hutchinson, Royal Veterinary College In 1872 Leland Stanford, the founder of California’s Stanford University, hired an eccentric inventor named Eadweard Muybridge to help resolve a supposed (but undocumented) bet: did a trotting horse’s feet leave the ground with all four feet or not? Muybridge was a skilled photographer and […]

29 July, 2024

Environment

Urban greening in Africa will help to build climate resilience – planners and governments need to work with nature

By Sintayehu W. Dejene, CGIAR System Organization and Razak Kiribou, Haramaya University Nature-based solutions are actions that use nature to solve environmental problems. Examples in cities would be setting up a wetland near a group of buildings to absorb floodwater, or building permeable pavements. The world’s developed countries have been implementing nature-based solutions since 2015 but Africa has fallen behind. We are part of […]

26 July, 2024

Environment

Sweden seeks to be winemaking’s next frontier

By Camille Bas-Wohlert, with Johannes Ledel and Olivier Feniet in Stockholm Far north of iconic wine regions like Bordeaux and Tuscany, Sweden is seeing a burgeoning industry of vineyards and a first generation of winemakers trying to carve out a niche. "There are millions of techniques, and I don't have a grandfather or grandmother to ask. So we need to figure it out ourselves," Lena Magnergard, […]

25 July, 2024

Environment

New fish found off Madagascar: remarkable long-nosed skate discovered in the deep ocean

By Simon Weigmann, Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change The Madagascar Ridge, in the southwestern Indian Ocean, is a remote, elevated area of seabed south of Madagascar. In 2016, my colleagues and I discovered a new cartilaginous fish species in its deep waters; a catshark that we named Bach’s catshark (Bythaelurus bachi) after German composer Johann Sebastian Bach. (In 2017 we discovered another new […]

25 July, 2024

Africa

Lesotho declares food insecurity emergency

Lesotho's government says people are at risk of extreme hunger in the next eight months. The country's Prime Minister Sam Matekane has declared a national food insecurity disaster spanning eight months from July 2024 to March 2025. The Lesotho Times reports Matekane announced that severe El Niño-induced droughts are causing extreme hunger for at least 700,000 Basotho, a notable rise from the 582,000 affected in the 2022/2023 period. This crisis, […]

24 July, 2024