Goal 7: ensure environmental sustainability - Newsfeed

NAIROBI Thursday, April 02, 2009 (IRIN) - Somalia has revoked fishing licences for foreign vessels and is planning a new law to regulate fishing in its waters, a minister told IRIN on 2 April.

JOHANNESBURG Thursday, April 02, 2009 (IRIN) - Food experts called attention to agriculture as a driver of climate change as the first round of talks on a global agreement to cut dangerous greenhouse gas emissions got underway in Germany this week, but development agency Oxfam cautioned that the focus should be on getting a better deal on adaptation for farmers.

JOHANNESBURG Wednesday, April 01, 2009 (IRIN) - With more rain predicted for much of Southern Africa the United Nations has released urgent emergency funding to accelerate assistance to thousands affected by the worst floods in over 40 years in Angola and Namibia.

JUGEDI Tuesday, March 31, 2009 (IRIN) - Pushkar Timilsina, a farmer in Jugedi village, southern Nepal, has decided to replace his traditional crops with something different and unusual - bananas. “The weather is becoming very unpredictable. We have to start preparing for the worst,” he told IRIN.

KANO Monday, March 30, 2009 (IRIN) - Officials in northern Nigeria’s Kano State have rehabilitated a creaking water plant in the small town of Wudil, 30 km south of Kano city in an effort to bring residents cheap, safe water, but some question if the price will stay affordable.

JOHANNESBURG Monday, March 30, 2009 (IRIN) - Countries staring into a gloomy future of low food production, less water, higher storm surges, longer dry periods and other expensive consequences of climate change have been told they can adapt at a cost ranging from several hundred billion dollars to over a trillion dollars.

DAKAR Monday, March 30, 2009 (IRIN) - After a visit in late March from French President Nicholas Sarkozy to Niger, residents in the uranium-exporting desert country continue questioning whether AREVA, a company primarily owned by the French government, will honour its promise to protect communities from mining hazards.

TEL AVIV Thursday, March 26, 2009 (IRIN) - A training programme for Asian and African policy-makers on how best to tackle desertification is under way at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies in Israel's Negev desert.

DAKAR Thursday, March 26, 2009 (IRIN) - Some of the 50 parliamentarians from across West Africa attending a conference on climate change, and food and water security held in Dakar on 25 and 26 March, looked uncomfortable when presented with a picture of a banana with a watermelon-coloured peel and an elephant with a cabbage head. “This is what you think genetically modified organisms (GMO) look like, right?” asked the plant breeding expert, Marcel Galiba. “I want you to reconsider,” he challenged the lawmakers.

FREETOWN Tuesday, March 24, 2009 (IRIN) - Mansark lives and works in Kroo bay slum, in the centre of the capital Freetown, home to 13,000 people, which has two working public water taps. Kroo Bay is littered with rubbish and sewage – many people use the rubbish to reclaim land on which to build ramshackle houses.

JOHANNESBURG Tuesday, March 24, 2009 (IRIN) - As the water level in the upper Zambezi River continues to climb past its highest levels ever, destroying crops and road networks, disaster officials in Namibia and Zambia have warned that food security could worsen.

KABUL Monday, March 23, 2009 (IRIN) - Reports of flash floods in different parts of the country over the past month have prompted the government to say it is better prepared than before to mitigate the effects of seasonal flooding in 2009.

BAGHDAD Sunday, March 22, 2009 (IRIN) - The Iraqi government will build residential complexes consisting of 5,000 houses to accommodate as many families in the marshlands area of southern Iraq, two local officials said.

ISTANBUL Thursday, March 19, 2009 (IRIN) - A cost-effective technology using locally available materials and manpower provides a sustainable way of stemming riverbank erosion on the Mekong river in Laos, according to Phaknakhone Rattana from Laos’s Ministry of Public Works and Transport.

SANAA Thursday, March 19, 2009 (IRIN) - The Yemen Agriculture Ministry’s Desert Locust Control Centre (DLCC) says there has been a new locust outbreak in the southern governorate of Shabwa and pest control teams are on standby.

NAIROBI Wednesday, March 18, 2009 (IRIN) - Food insecurity in Kenya, already affecting millions of people, is set to escalate because the long rains are late and unlikely to be sufficient, officials warned.

JOHANNESBURG Wednesday, March 18, 2009 (IRIN) - Madagascar's political infighting has drawn international attention, but aid agencies warn that the ongoing tug-of-war for power should not detract from soaring food prices, severe drought in the south, and the destruction left by two tropical cyclones.

DAKAR Wednesday, March 18, 2009 (IRIN) - For more than 20 years scientists have tried to introduce in Niger the acacia plant typically grown by aborigines living in dry zones of Australia. Despite the perennial’s ability to withstand windstorms, heat and drought, Nigerien farmers have been slow to acacias or their protein-packed seeds. But with deforestation wiping out trees in Africa, agriculture experts told IRIN this aborigine import may fill a growing void.

JALALABAD Tuesday, March 17, 2009 (IRIN) - The eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar has lost about 90 percent of its forests since 1989 - a major contributory factor to aridity, air pollution, loss of habitat and vulnerability to flash floods, according to experts and provincial officials.

BAGHDAD Monday, March 16, 2009 (IRIN) - On 12 March the Iraqi government and a number of UN agencies launched a $47 million initiative to remove dykes and canals built by the regime of former President Saddam Hussein so that water can flow back into marshland areas.