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/ 22 November 2005
Over the next few months, more than 10-million hungry people in six Southern African countries will need Western help to stay alive after their crops failed earlier this year. A massive humanitarian effort is under way, led by the United Nations’s World Food Programme. But in southern Zambia, one of the worst hit of the regions most affected by this year’s unreliable rains, some families will not get food.
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/ 2 September 2005
The Louisiana coastline may have been so badly damaged by the hurricane because man-made engineering of the delta has led to erosion of natural defences, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. The engineering of the past 100 years has also disturbed natural barriers which traditionally prevented storm surges and protected against hurricanes, says the society.
For a month now, the BBC, CNN, ITV and others have been reporting what has been portrayed as one of the greatest humanitarian and human rights disasters in years. At least 200 000 people are said to have been forcibly evicted from slum areas of Harare in Zimbabwe. The figure peaked last week at 1,5-million.
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/ 11 February 2005
Almost two-thirds of money promised by governments to help the millions of people affected by the Indian Ocean tsunami has not yet been received by the United Nations, confirming fears that many countries would try to wriggle out of their commitments. Speaking in Geneva this week, a UN official urged governments to pay up.
As the clear-up from the Asian tsunami starts and the full damage is assessed, there is growing consensus among scientists, environmentalists and Asian fishing communities that the impact was considerably worsened by tourist, shrimp farm and other industrial developments that have destroyed or degraded mangrove forests and other natural sea defences.
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/ 2 November 2004
A team of eight economists, brought together by the controversial environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg, has declared it is not worth spending money on climate change because the effects are expected to be far in the future. Lomborg’s bestseller, The Skeptical Environmentalist, created storms of protest by throwing doubt on climate change science, and is hailed by free marketeers round the world, but reviled by many scientists.
Within hours of arriving in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea’s capital, visitors are likely to be followed by informers, stopped by the army and arrested by police, who will strip the film from their cameras, follow them to their hotel, question their motives for being there, and interrogate anyone they have talked to. John Vidal recently visited Equatorial Guinea, one of the few Western journalists to do so in recent years.
The world is heading for wildly uneven population swings in the next 45 years, with many rich countries ”downsizing” during a period in which almost all developing nations will grow at breakneck speed. A new report predicts that at least an extra 1 000-million will be living in the world’s poorest African countries by 2050. There are more people on Earth than ever before, and fewer resources to support them.
Hailstones the size of tennis balls are knocking people out in Japan. Shortly afterwards it is snowing in India. But that is only the beginning. But The Day After Tomorrow, a climate change movie released in mid-May, has been winning praise from both the research establishment and the environment movement.
Kong Chiong Lok, known as "King Kong", is the face of the global logging industry; a middle-aged, cheerful Malaysian working right on the equator deep in the Gabonese forests, cutting African wood with American machinery to make flooring and plywood for the Chinese and European markets. But the bad news is, the global logging industry is stripping forests unsustainably.