'We don’t want South Africa to be the death of Kyoto Protocol,' Minister of Environment, Edwina Molewa said recently, referring to the outcomes aspired to by the incoming South African COP17 Presidency from 28 November to 9 December 2011. But what are the real chances of life for the Kyoto and what are the stakes if we lose it? The best bet, Molewa concedes is to take key elements of the Protocol and build it into a single new agreement, with a comprehensive united approach. The key issue will be whether the positive or flawed elements of Kyoto will be retained.

The Engen refinery in Durban was given 15 days recently to produce a report on a fire that took place at the refinery, come up with a plan to replace old machinery and also a plan to stop future fires, or face criminal charges. But South Durban Community and Environmental Alliance co-ordinator Desmond D’Sa
said it was 'a complete charade' ahead of the 17th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP17), to be hosted by Durban. 'People have had respiratory problems and contracted many other diseases, such as asthma and different cancers, because of the high levels of pollution,' he said.

Prominent Gaza human rights lawyer Raji Sourani has called South African judge Richard Goldstone a liar, following recent comments he made in the New York Times regarding apartheid in Israel. Speaking at a Palestine Solidarity Campaign event, the founder of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza lashed out at Goldstone for saying apartheid did not exist in Israel. Last month, Goldstone criticised the Russell Tribunal in an opinion piece in the New York Times, entitled 'Israel and the apartheid slander'. He wrote that there was no apartheid in Israel, and called the suggestion a 'particularly pernicious and enduring canard'.

The discovery of massive diamond deposits in Zimbabwe has led to hundreds of media reports exploring the abuse of human rights and grandscale corruption. It can be difficult to keep up to date with events as they unfold, or to tease out the key story as it unfolds. Activist group Sokwanele has produced a full report that aims to synthesise this glut information into a single report providing an accessible and wide ranging overview of events, meetings, human rights abuses, environmental degradation, and the network of the people involved in the story.

‘To take seriously the cause of the environment, including the issue of climate change, requires that we first take seriously the cause of justice itself,’ argues Brian K. Murphy.

Talks on climate change had reckoned without labour and labour related issues until now. But as Yahya Msangi points out, climate change ought to take account of labour.

Multinational corporations are buying enormous tracts of land in Africa to the detriment of local communities. Agazit Abate warns that the land grab puts countries on the path to increased food insecurity, environmental degradation, increased reliance on aid and marginalisation of farming and pastoralist communities.

As industrial agricultural corporation AgriSol Energy sets it sights on 800,000 acres (325,000 hectares) of land in Tanzania that is home to 162,000 people, the Oakland Institute continues its call for people to urge the company, other investors and the government to step away from the project.

The global diamonds watchdog, the Kimberley Process, has cleared Zimbabwe to sell alluvial diamonds from the controversial Marange fields, despite documented evidence that top military and political chefs are involved in massive looting and that human rights abuses continue.

In the run-up to the UN’s Rio+20 meeting next year and the Durban Conference of the Parties in November, ETC Group’s new book reveals ‘information that the large corporations who profit from climate change do not want the public to know.’

It’s unlikely we’ll get ‘an equitable outcome’ from COP17, but it will be ‘a great moment to intensify campaigns against the business-as-usual manner’ in which climate negotiations have been conducted so far, writes Nnimmo Bassey.

The build-up to the final United Nations Convention on Climate Change meeting in 2011 has been fractious and combative even as many countries grapple with negative impacts of climate change. Durban may not save the world, writes Kwesi W. Obeng.

Several major new dams are being constructed on the Niger River. The new dams not only raise ecological concerns, but are also provoking difficult negotiations over equitably sharing the resources of a river basin that extends over two million square kilometres. 'There are nine countries in the Niger basin, but their interests are divergent. There are certain countries - such as Mali and Niger - which don't want any dams constructed upstream,' said Bi Tozan N'Guessan, an expert at the Côte d'Ivoire Water Ministry.

Mountains of hazardous waste grow by about 40 million tons every year. This waste, mostly from Europe and North America, is burned in developing countries like Ghana in a hazardous effort to recover valuable metals. A children's school in Accra, Ghana's capital, was recently found to be contaminated by lead, cadmium and other health-threatening pollutants at levels over 50 times higher than risk-free levels. The school is located directly beside an informal electronic waste salvage site.

The adoption of international guidelines to regulate so-called land grabs has been pushed to next year after negotiators failed to agree on conditions for large-scale land investments and enforcement. The guidelines, in the making for several years, were sparked by fears that a 'land rush' is leading to hunger, conflict and human rights abuses. More and more investors have flocked to the developing world over the past decade, snapping up huge tracts of farmland. Investment has intensified since the 2008 food and fuel price crisis. Once in place, the United Nations’s Committee on World Food Security guidelines are meant to protect people, mainly in poor countries such as Sierra Leone, from 'land grabbing'.

The Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA) commissioned investigations on the 'land grab' in South Sudan which culminated into a 48-page dossier dubbed 'The New Frontier'. The dossier reveals that in the period 2007 to 2010 'foreign interests sought or acquired a total of 2.64 million hectares of land (6.52 million acres) in the agriculture, forestry and biofuel sectors alone'. According to the report’s author David Kuol Mading: 'That is a larger land area than the entire country of Rwanda,' said the report’s author, David Kuol Mading.

Africa remains at the mercy of a self-interested international ruling class interested purely in maximising profit at all costs and consolidating its position, writes Yash Tandon. As the continent faces up to the enormous challenge of climate change and the creation of a sustainable ‘green economy’, it must look inwards and draw upon its own expertise and resources and resist the temptation to rely on compromised external ‘experts’, Tandon stresses.

cc FairPhoneClimate change is set to intensify, resulting in a rising number of conflicts around the extraction and export of Africa’s natural resources to feed the industries of the historically biggest polluters in the industrialised north, writes Godwin Uyi Ojo.

Climate change is already exacting a toll on populations and species around the world. Responses to the phenomenon must, however, be based not solely on economics but also science and the equity issue, writes Hewa Nzuri.

As the international climate change negotiations intensify in the run up to the Durban, South Africa COP 17, developed countries are pushing hard to destroy some of the UN processes and measures that could save the Earth from the brink, writes Lim Li Lin.