NYT News Service
As if some spells of droughts persisting over three centuries are not enough, Africa will experience more such mega droughts if studies are to be believed, writes Andrew C Revkin

A network of "super-reefs" off east Africa are unusually resilient to climate change and could provide important lessons for coral conservation in other parts of the world, researchers said on Friday.

Experts say the planet has lost about a fifth of its corals and warn that many of the remaining reefs could die in the next 20 to 40 years, unless greenhouse gas emissions are reduced.

Europe should push for tighter laws to curb the illegal timber trade by making both importers and exporters get licenses to show their wood does not come from endangered rainforests, lawmakers said on Wednesday.

African nations must stop signing away their natural resources in skewed deals with foreign firms, the African winner of the 2009 "Green Nobel" prize, said in an interview.

Ona, a wheelchair-bound Gabonese activist, has won the African 2009 Goldman Environmental Prize for a decade of activism to protect the Congo Basin Rainforest, the second- largest rainforest in the world.

From the rainforests of Africa to the mountain-top coal mines of West Virginia, six campaigners who have fought governments and industry to protect the planet won prestigious Goldman Environmental Prizes on Sunday.

There will be climate related conflicts in the future if the global community fails to protect the ozone layer, Environment and Natural Resources Minister Champika Ranawaka said inaugurating the sub regional workshop on Ozone Depleting Substances (ODS) pase out in military applications, yesterday.

For at least 3,000 years, a drumbeat of potent droughts, far longer and more severe than any experienced recently, have seared a belt of sub-Saharan Africa that is now home to tens of millions of the world

The recent decades-long drought that killed 100,000 people in Africa's Sahel may be a small foretaste of monstrous "megadroughts" that could grip the region as global climate change worsens, scientists reported on Thursday.