Returning to Burundi after years as a refugee in Tanzania, Jonas Saya knew it would be difficult to reclaim his land from former neighbours who had settled on it. "I wanted my children to get a home of their own," he said. Saya, 56, returned with six children after spending 37 years in Ulyankulu old settlement, western Tanzania.

Nigerian gunboats exchanged fire with militants in the western Niger Delta on Friday, security sources and a prominent ethnic activist said, the latest sign of deepening unrest at the heart of Africa's biggest oil industry. More than a dozen navy gunboats opened fire on militants along Chanomi Creek in Delta state, the sources said. The region is home to U.S. energy giant Chevron's Escravos export terminal and Nigeria's 125,000 barrels per day Warri refinery.

On May 26, oil giant Shell will face a groundbreaking trial in U.S. federal court for complicity in human rights abuses. Shell faces a number of serious charges, including conspiring with a Nigerian military dictatorship to bring about the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight fellow activists who led a mass movement against Shell's environmental devastation of their homeland in the oil-rich Niger Delta.

In the past two years, various non-African countries - China, India, South Korea, Britain and the Arab Gulf states lead the pack - have been taking over huge tracts of farmland in Africa by lease or purchase, to produce food or biofuels for their own use. Critics call them "neo-colonialists", but they will not be as successful as the old ones.

The availability of water purification tablets, digging of shallow wells in rural areas as well as privatisation of water services have resulted in more people in Somalia's self-declared republic of Somaliland gaining access to clean water and proper sanitation, officials said. At least 45-50 percent of the Somaliland population now has access to safe water, compared with 35 percent in 2000, according to Ali Sheikh Omar Qabil, director of environmental health in the Ministry of Health and Labour.

"Remember 'We Are the World'?" asked Mahmoud Abdalla, a leader of the Hidareb ethnic community in Eritrea's arid Anseba region along the northwestern border with Sudan, referring to the 1985 hit song by more than 40 top artists. "Remember the 1984 famine in Ethiopia? This region was right in the middle of it." In 1984 Eritrea was part of Ethiopia, where some of the song’s proceeds were spent.

Environmental researchers predict Southern Africa will be hit heavily by climate change over the next 70 years. Agricultural production is projected to be halved - a development that will threaten the livelihoods of farmers in a region where 70 percent of the population are smallholder farmer

Eritrea has avoided international attention in recent years in ways that may have protected the Red Sea country's rulers from proper scrutiny but benefit no one else. Even those who recall that the continent's youngest state gained its unlikely independence from Ethiopia in 1993 after a bloody thirty-year struggle may be shocked to hear that the optimistic nationalism of the 1990s has been dissolved under President Isaias Afewerki into a despairing void, causing thousands of Eritreans to flee the country that they fought so hard to establish.

As nutritionists and medical doctors continue advising people to eat more fish for healthy living, environmental experts are now condemning this nutritious food, leaving people confused. The experts are basing their caution on new findings that show increased mercury levels in fish that is finding its way into the lake from mines around the lake.

The Harper government must report in a national public database all the pollution being produced by mining companies, a Federal Court judge has ruled. The National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI), created in 1993, details all the industrial and commercial pollutants released into the air, water and land in Canada. Since 2006, NPRI has also required that all pollutants released during mining activities must be reported. Some of the waste found in tailings and waste rock — including mercury, sulphuric acid and arsenic — is deemed toxic by law and must be reported in the NPRI.

The land reform that has unfolded in Zimbabwe since 2000 has had diverse consequences. There is no single story. Today policymakers are grappling with the question of ‘what next’? How can a new agrarian structure be supported, and a vibrant rural economy be developed? Yet such discussions are often taking place in a vacuum, with limited empirical data from the ground and overshadowed by misperceptions and inappropriate assumptions.

Six relatively unknown grassroots activists from around the globe receive a moment in the spotlight when the Goldman Environmental Prize announces its list of annual recipients. The prize, now in its 20th year, is considered the Nobel Prize for the environment. Past recipients include Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai, former Brazilian environment minister Marina Silva, and Nigerian environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was killed seven months after his recognition.

On 8 April, Agriculture and Land Affairs Minister Lulu Xingwana acted on her threat to reclaim redistribution farms that were not being used. In the fifth such repossession, the minister moved onto a Gauteng farm with a group of officials, reportedly telling a tenant: “Do you know who I am? I am the minister of land affairs and this is my house. Pack your bags and get out of my house right now.”

A coalition of NGOs campaigning for China’s leading dam builder to adopt international environmental standards has received a promising response from the company, writes Peter Bosshard. , whose investments include several dams in Africa, confirmed its commitment to global and host country regulation, including ISO 14001. The company also expressed willingness to continue dialogue with the coalition.

This week Sokari Ekine broadens her usual selection of blogs by Africans at home or in the diaspora to include the best of the ‘Afrophile’ bloggers. From analysis of the continuing violence in Madagascar, to Blackstar’s musings on press freedom and Sociolingo’s poetic pieces about Dogon paintings, Ekine finds that the ‘Afrophiles’ offer additional insightful commentary on issues not covered elsewhere in the African blogosphere.

cc Zionism is the root cause of suffering, bloodshed and the rift between Arabs and Jews, Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, spokesperson for Neturei Karta International – an organisation that represents anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews – has said. In Durban Review Conference, Weiss said that Zionist movement transformed Judaism into ‘a materialistic, political, nationalistic goal’, which presented its critics as ‘anti-Semitic’ or ‘self-hating Jews.’ Speaking of his hopes too see the Palestine question addressed, he added that the Holocaust should not be used to further Zionist goals or to justify the oppression of another people.

A Mozambican green community project and a Kenyan forest project have today been named as winners in the climate grants awards. Together with a third winner from Peru, the Nhambita Community Carbon Project, Mozambique and the Kakamega Forest Again Project, Kenya would each get a US$ 35,000 grant that will help them spur the forest-based carbon offset projects.

An environmental NGO in northern Senegal is about to go to market with “green charcoal” – a household fuel produced from agricultural waste materials to replace wood and charcoal in cooking stoves. Given that Senegal’s trees are disappearing, finding viable alternatives is a must, a Ministry of Energy official says. At least half of Senegal’s 13 million people rely on wood and charcoal for household fuel, while 40 percent relying on petrol products like butane gas, the ministry says.

Some of the developing world's largest rivers are drying up because of climate change, threatening water supplies in some of the most populous places on Earth, say scientists. Researchers from the US-based National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) analysed data combined with computer models to assess flow in 925 rivers — nearly three quarters of the world's running water supply — between 1948 and 2004.

A three-day regional workshop aimed at strengthening the competences of executives in the fields of environmental communication, advocacy and leadership opens in Dakar on Monday. The workshop to be held under the auspices, Enda-LEAD Afrique, an NGO, is to train "ambassadors" to improve their exchanges with staff of various ministries about the importance of sustainable management of the environment and natural resources for economic and social development, and the importance of the integration of links between poverty and the environment.