Conservation

TRAFFIC, the Wildlife Trade Monitoring Network, has described as “tiny” the rate of decrease of rhino poaching in South Africa in 2017 compared to 2016. South Africa on Thursday, January 25, 2018 announced the official number of rhinos illegally killed in the country during 2017 as 1,028 animals. But the a non-governmental organisation working globally on the trade of wild ...

Corruption and climate change are arguably the defining challenges facing the world today. Both problems – and their solutions – are interlinked. In particular, corruption is one of the driving forces behind deforestation and forest degradation, a major cause of climate change (according to the UN, deforestation and forest degradation account for around17% of carbon emissions worldwide). Interventions to reduce deforestation ...

Protected areas across the world are most threatened by unsustainable resource use and human disturbance, a new study has found. The authors of this paper, published this week in Conservation Letters, looked at data from nearly 2,000 terrestrial protected areas to identify the most common threats they face. Unsustainable hunting and negative impacts from recreational activities were the most commonly reported threats ...

Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) has welcomed the British government’s plan to close – with some limited exemptions – its domestic ivory markets. Ivory (whether raw or worked) continues to be traded legally within UK and the other European Union (EU) Member States, in auction houses, markets, shops and online – and that antique items can even be traded without permits ...

Forty one-year-old Robert Kirotich was on Tuesday, January 16, 2018 reportedly shot by EU-funded guards working for the Kenya Forestry Service. Another wounded man, David Kipkosgei Kiptilkesi, was taken away by the guards and his condition said to be unknown. At 2pm on Tuesday, Robert Kirotich was said to be herding cattle in Kapkok Glade, in the Embobut Forest area ...

The Conservator-General, Nigeria National Park Service, Alhaji Ibrahim Goni, on Monday, January 15, 2018 said that the service would be repositioned for global service delivery so as to boost its revenue generation potential. Goni said this in an interview with News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja. He said that since one of the roles of the service was to ...

In line with resolutions reached at the 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (CoP17) to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) held in 2016 in South Africa, Parties are to take an inventory of existing elephant ivory, rhino horn. CITES in a recent directive requested countries to mark elephant ivory tusks and ...

The number of lions in the wild is said to be steadily decreasing. In just two decades, Africa’s lion population has decreased by 43%, according to the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF). The Nairobi, Kenya-based group says one of the main causes is the alarming rate at which the big cats are losing their habitats due to expanding human populations and ...

The Federal Ministry of Environment says it will start sensitising communities on the effects of land degradation across the country. Mr Bala Gukut, the Deputy Director, Drought and Desertification Amelioration Department, disclosed this to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Wednesday, January 10, 2018 in Abuja. He said that the federal government had set up a working committee on ...

Lagos-based environmental non-governmental organisation (NGO), the Nigerian Conservation Foundation (NCF), is set to begin the year with an annual public lecture which is geared at gaining public support for burning environmental issues. The Chief S. L. Edu Memorial Lecture is part of NCF’s sustainable development agenda and its contribution to nation building. The 2018 Lecture will be the 16th edition. ...