An explosion rocked a government guest house in Nigeria's oil-producing Niger Delta on Wednesday, a month after twin car bombings in the capital Abuja, a local government official said. The explosion damaged two upstairs rooms of the guest house in Asaba, the capital of Delta state, but there were no injuries, Sunny Ogefere, spokesman for the state governor said.

A three-year project to increase forest cover and help local communities in eastern Uganda adapt to climate change has been launched. 'The planting of one million trees has started to sustain an area of tropical forest in Africa the size of Wales,' said John Griffiths, counsel-general of the Welsh Assembly, which is supporting the project. 'These trees will not only absorb carbon but provide shade for crops.'

Entries for the UNEP Young Environmental Journalist Award Africa are now open. The competition, which is made possible through funding support from the Government of the United States of America, is open to African journalists between 25 and 35 years old, working for African news and media organisations.

You would expect to find children in the Vaal River outside Parys on a hot afternoon. But 28 of them, on the Gauteng side of the river, are not swimming; they are doing research for ORASECOM. For three months beginning in November, ORASECOM, the Orange-Senqu River Commission, will test the water quality, the environmental impact of industry and the general health of the ecosystem at some 60 sites along the river basin. The data is to be shared amongst all four of the participating states and the goal is to get some idea on the impact of water use along the system.

Reporting to the Head of International Grants and managing a small team, you’ll lead on the delivery of our trade and climate change programme strategies, and the development of our social investment strategy as well as playing a critical role in strengthening corporate and other relationships that will enable us to fulfill our mission.

Reporting to the Head of International Grants and managing a small team, you’ll lead on the delivery of our trade and climate change programme strategies, and the development of our social investment strategy as well as playing a critical role in strengthening corporate and other relationships that will enable us to fulfill our mission.

The European Union has set up a fund to promote partnerships between public water supply systems in Europe and corresponding utilities in subsaharan Africa. Seasoned observers disagree over whether or not this represents a definitive break with the old strategy of privatisation. Up to 10 years ago, our governments and economic elites were pushing the idea that drinking water supplies could not be expanded without private sector participation. Water privatisation was stubbornly opposed.

Land administration policies in Zambia are heavily centralized. The 1995 Lands Act that regulates Zambia’s land policy stipulates that all land is to be held in trust by the president, and most of the poor people live on customary land as they cannot afford to obtain a leasehold tenure. There are organisations trying to rectify this, however. The Zambia Land Alliance (ZLA), a network of NGOs working for pro-poor land policies, has previously criticised both post-independence and present land legislation as being inadequate, of not listening to the poor that to a large degree tend the land, and of focusing too heavily on liberalising land markets.

Chief Sumani Amidu of Kpachaa village in northern Ghana, has sat by as over half of his 100 villagers abandon him to seek new jobs and sources of food for their families. Three years ago the chief sold the village land for GH¢100 for a promise that never came. Now forced to farm himself to keep the children of the village alive, each morning on his 40-minute walk to the village’s last farm ing plot, he passes his old farmland now owned by a Norwegian biofuel company.

Activists have started mobilising communities to demand the implementation of environmental laws following the government’s alleged reluctance to halt the degradation of the eco-system. Environmentalists said since 1992, the government had formulated many environmental laws and agencies to protect natural resources but it has failed to enforce the laws. 'Since the government has failed to honour its commitments, we have chosen to empower communities to have the right and ability to influence decisions about the environment and national resources that sustain their livelihood,' said Godber Tumushabe, the executive director for Advocates Coalition for Development and Environment.

Members of the Kimberley Process diamond watchdog began talks in Jerusalem on Monday over whether to allow Zimbabwe to resume exports of the gemstone from its controversial Marange fields. The organisation, which is meant to ensure diamonds are 'conflict free', suspended its certification of the Marange fields last year, over claims of forced labour and torture at the gem mines.

The Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), a Geneva-based international housing rights watchdog, has released a 'report card' examining Uganda’s national land policy and land reform processes and their impact on women. The report, 'The Impact of National Land Policy and Land Reform on Women in Uganda', was released together with the Women's Land Link Africa (WLLA), a joint initiative of organisations dedicated to improving women's land and housing rights in Africa. One of the main findings of the study was that while there have been many advances in land reform in Uganda that grant women legal rights, custom and practice are still lagging behind the law, leading to a regular violation of women’s land rights.

'Water management in South Africa is in serious crisis. Consumers were recently told to wash their fruit and vegetables as they could be infected by disease causing E. coli microbes because the crops were irrigated with water contaminated by sewage,' writes Glenn Ashton on the website of the South African Civil Society Information Service. 'Acid Mine Drainage (AMD) is killing not just crocodiles but entire riverine eco-systems. Our dams, rivers and streams are becoming ever more stressed due to the low flows of water that remain in them because of illegal over-abstraction for irrigation and contamination by poorly maintained sewage works.'

The South African Sugarcane Research Institute (SASRI) has applied to the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries for permission to conduct field trials for four varieties of GM sugarcane. Having viewed SASRI's applications in terms of the Public Access to Information Act (PAIA), the African Centre for Biodiversity issued a statement saying: 'It is our opinion that the information provided is so inadequate that it is virtually impossible to conduct any meaningful independent assessment of the applications. Further, throughout the application runs the assumption that the genetically modified lines under discussion are 'equivalent' to their conventional counterparts. This is a view not supported by the published literature.' Read the rest of the statement through the weblink provided.

Under the guise of developing ‘climate-ready’ crops, the world’s largest seed and agrochemical corporations are filing hundreds of sweeping, multi-genome patents in a bid to control the world’s plant biomass, according to a report released by ETC Group.

Tom Olang’ examines the new protections against hate speech in Kenya and how oversight mechanisms protect – or don’t – minorities from hate speech.

Gus Pickard, a rural development consultant operating in the Western Cape, has a strange problem, writes Karin Kleinbooi on the blog Another Countryside. He has been contacted by a farming family living on land near Elim: they desperately need help because they may lose their land - to the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform. 'The family has been farming on the land for many years. Despite setbacks they have survived; but they have also accumulated significant debt — not enough to render them insolvent, but enough to put them under pressure. Seeking a way out of their conundrum, they applied for land reform funds. Their application was successful — but nothing happened, until after a long silence, the Department contacted them and told that instead of getting money, the Department would buy the farm back from them for the amount of money needed to settle the debt. '

It sounds too good to be true: a biofuel crop that grows on semi-arid lands and degraded soils, replaces fossil fuels in developing countries and brings huge injections of cash to poor smallholders. That is what some are claiming for Jatropha curcas, the 'miracle' biofuel crop. But studies on the ground suggest a lot more research and development (R&D) is needed before farmers can come close to seeing any of the promised benefits.

South Africa is set to unveil plans this week for a huge solar power plant that it claims would be the largest in the world. UK newspaper The Guardian reported on Monday that the project is expected to cost up to US$28.5 billion.

As the floodwaters begin to recede in parts of Benin, the new threat is an outbreak of infectious diseases, particularly cholera and malaria. The worst flooding in nearly half a century in the country of some nine million people has cut many communities off from health centres, 'paralysing access to health care in a situation that lends itself to a potential outbreak of waterborne disease,' the NGO CARE in Benin said in a communiqué.