A driving force of the UN-led negotiations for years has been the effort to attract the private sector, offering more and more opportunities for business in the still nascent 'green economy'. The inclusion of carbon capture and storage (CCS) systems among the financeable mechanisms for reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases is one example of that trend. But many environmentalists and scientists believe that the carbon market is getting ahead of itself. 'It is a further way of moving away from renewable energies, moving away from mitigation, to some kind of technology that would not solve the problem,' Nigerian Nnimmo Bassey, chair of Friends of the Earth International (FOEI), told Tierramérica.

The illicit diamond trade in Zimbabwe has led to the murder of thousands, enriched those close to President Robert Mugabe and been financed in part by the central bank, according to US documents on WikiLeaks. In the classified documents that date from before the unity government came to power, US diplomats cite a well established British mining executive as saying those close to Mugabe, including his wife, 'have been extracting tremendous profits' from the Chiadzwa mine in the eastern part of the country.

Algeria will launch a program of renewable energy development over the next 20 years, expected to increase its production of electricity from alternative sources such as solar or wind, Algerian Ennahar newspaper said on Monday. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika on Sunday ordered the government to present to the Council of Ministers in 2011, a 'genuine national development plan of new and renewable energy'.

If you are a researcher, policy-maker, donor, NGO or community representative, share your knowledge and experience at the AfricaAdapt Climate Change Symposium 2011. This landmark event is Africa-focussed and free to attend.

UK loans to low-income countries will make the poor pay twice for climate change, writes Nick Dearden.

Small-scale gold miners have implored Government to support them to enhance productive capacity to ensure optimal use of the vast claims they hold. The small miners said they had capacity to produce about 1,2 tonnes of gold every month if supported with adequate financial resources and equipment.

A Saudi Arabian investor plans to invest in a 5,000 hectare farm and a fruit-processing plant in Zambia, the African country’s Finance Minister Situmbeko Musokotwane said. The contract will be signed in the next three months for the land, which will be leased, Musokotwane told reporters in Riyadh at a conference today. He didn’t identify the Saudi investor.

Senegal is in talks with Saudi Arabia to lease farmland to grow food of an area nearly four times the size of Manhattan, an official in Senegal involved in the deal told Reuters. Like other wealthy Gulf states Saudi Arabia has been buying farmland in Asia and Africa to secure food supplies after inflation had nearly doubled the price of food in 2008.

The military Joint Task Force (JTF) battling militants in Nigeria's oil producing Niger Delta region last Wednesday raided and destroyed three camps operated by militant John Togo, seizing several weapons, a military spokesman said. The JTF spokesman, Lt.-Col Timothy Antigha, however said Thursday it was too early to give casualty figures, while denying rebels' claim that 100 people, mostly civilians, were killed in the attack, in the creeks of Delta state.

Egypt does not want to see a divided Sudan after the 9 January 2011 referendum, fearing an independent South will threaten its stranglehold on the River Nile waters, a leaked US embassy cable has revealed. In the cables published by online whistleblower WikiLeaks, Egypt had even asked the US government to help postpone the referendum by four to six years. The position is radically divergent from that of Intergovernmental Authority on Development (Igad) which on behalf of African Union has been pushing the Sudan parties to adhere to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) and hold the referendum next year as scheduled.

The Southern African Development Community (SADC) is moving to support its member countries to tap into benefits from the reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) framework. Destruction of forests both contributes to carbon emissions and deprives the planet of an important mechanism to soak up atmospheric carbon dioxide that contributes to global warming.

Low expectations about the outcomes of Cancun show how far climate change has fallen on the world's political agenda. ‘And that is bad indeed,’ writes Martin Khor, ‘because the climate problem has got even worse.’

Uncleared minefields in northern Uganda’s Lamwo district have prevented thousands of people displaced during the Lord’s Resistance Army insurgency from returning home, officials said. 'These people can’t go to their villages [in Agoro sub-county] unless the place is cleared and declared free of the landmines,' local government official Mathew Ocen Akiya told IRIN. He said some 10,000 people were unable to go home because of the mines.

Saudi Arabia's strategy to outsource food production will be at the top of the agenda when several heads of state and high-level delegations from African countries arrive in Riyadh for an investor conference on 4 December 2010. In some of these countries, Saudi investors are already acquiring farmland and starting to put the Kingdom's policies into operation. One of their main targets is West Africa's rice lands.

According to UN-HABITAT’s State of African Cities 2010, the share of Africans living in cities is set to jump from 40 per cent in 2009 to 60 per cent in 2050. The projections of this report indicate that Lagos, Nigeria, will surpass Cairo to become Africa’s most populous city, while Kinshasha, DR Congo, is expected become the fastest-growing city on the continent and top Cairo’s population within a decade.

Lamenting Somalia’s long-term problems, Warsan Cismaan Saalax stresses that it ‘is important to begin triangled negotiations and dialogue between the TFG [Transitional Federal Government], Puntland and Somaliland’.

Uganda has lost more than two million hectares of forest since 1990, mostly converted to farmland by a growing population of smallholders. Carbon finance through the REDD programme is often presented as one way to arrest this destruction, but only if the benefits clearly translate to the grassroots. Almost a fifth of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide comes from the destruction of forests – second only to the energy sector. The idea behind REDD – reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation – is to give carbon stored in forests a financial value; financing the protection of forests in developing countries like Uganda with money raised from selling carbon stored in those trees to polluters in the developed world.

Ministers and heads of African states refused to pass a draft declaration on climate change at the Africa-EU summit, it is said. Participating ministers refused to pass the draft Joint Africa- EU Declaration on Climate Change because it only showed the EU position rather than the African countries’ stance, Ahmed Abul Gheit said after a ministerial meeting in the Libyan capital of Tripoli last Sunday.

Olivier Mushiete sees himself as a pioneer: His ever-expanding acacia forest on the Bateké plateau, 120km east of Kinshasa, is central Africa’s first carbon sink plantation. 'Each hectare of acacia trees can capture 25-30 tons of CO2. They grow quickly and have no known predators, parasites or viruses. What’s more, they are leguminous so their leaves fertilize the soil. They’re great,' he enthused. Every day the plantation traps several tons of CO2. Mushiete, an agricultural engineer, has sold some of this sequestered greenhouse gas, in the form of carbon credits, for US$4 million, with the first payments due in 2012, once the first trees reach maturity.

As wealthy investors continue to buy up agricultural land in the developing world, stakeholders disagree over how to regulate such transactions. 'Everyone agrees that you can't have a wild-west scenario where countries and companies are going into countries and getting land for next to nothing,' Michael Taylor, programme manager with the International Land Coalition (ILC), a global alliance of land rights organisations, told IRIN from Rome. 'The problem is that there are different entrenched interests and it's hard to reconcile the two sides.'