Conservation

Bothered by what it terms unsustainable consumption of the meat of some marine, coastal and estuarine animal species, a Swiss non-profit conservation organisation has called for measures to address the situation and save the animals from extinction. Some of the endangered animals regularly hunted and consumed as aquatic bushmeat include the manatee, five species of turtle, seven species of dolphin ...

South Africa’s constitutional court on Wednesday, April 5, 2017 rejected an attempt by the government to keep a ban on the domestic trade in rhino horns. This is the outcome of a long legal battle with John Hume, the world’s largest rhino breeder. The ruling that the application be dismissed means that rhino horns can effectively be traded in the ...

On a typical day, veterinarians of International Animal Rescue (IAR) make their way through choking smoke, weighed down with medical supplies, a safety net, animal carrier and face masks. They are called out almost daily to rescue orangutans and other animals trapped by forest fires and attend to their medical needs. The forest had been burning for five days and ...

The Arctic Ocean urgently needs protection as melting sea ice is opening up previously inaccessible areas to activities such as shipping, bottom trawl fishing and oil exploration, according to a scientific report launched on Tuesday, April 4, 2017 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), in partnership with the US-based Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and UNESCO’s World ...

Peer-reviewed study shows deforestation drops dramatically the same year land rights are granted to indigenous communities in Peru A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides some of the first rigorous peer-reviewed evidence that giving indigenous communities formal legal title to their land protects tropical forests. The study was conducted by researchers from Resources for ...

If the new Policy on Wetland Conservation and Management being developed by the Lagos State Government eventually sees the light of the day, advocacy will be a major strategy towards ensuring its effective application. Being a low-lying coastal city, Lagos displays wide-ranging water bodies like oceans, lagoon, rivers, swamps and creeks, all endowed with wetland ecological assets. Wetlands are areas ...

South African rhino poaching numbers for the last year show a decline for the second consecutive year due to concerted conservation efforts. However, there is still a long road ahead as Africa continues to lose an average of three rhinos a day to the ongoing poaching crisis, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has said. In 2016 alone, 1,054 rhinos ...

On Tuesday, March 7 2017, at the Triple Point in the heart of Park W, where the territories of Benin, Niger and Burkina Faso meet, the General Directors of the wildlife management agencies from each of the three countries signed an agreement to strengthen collaboration in wildlife law enforcement in this critical wildlife area. This effectively gives the “green light” to ...

The Nigerian Conservation Foundation (NCF) has disclosed that, with the support of the United Nations Developmet Programme – Global Environment Facility/Small Grants Programme (UNDP-GEF/SGP), it is implementing a project on Integrated Rural Economic and Sustainable Forest Management in Boje (Ebok, Kabakken and Ebranta) communities in Boki Local Government Area (LGA) in Cross River State on resilience and mitigation of the ...

How much damage can one snake do? If it’s the brown treesnake (Boiga irregularis), an invasive species on the West Pacific island of Guam, the answer is a lot. This snake likely arrived on Guam after World War II and has killed off almost all of the island’s forest bird species, making it a “poster child” for invasive animals. But ...