Accra, Apr 22 Climate change in Africa could leave 250 million more people short of water by 2020, spurring conflicts and threatening stability on the world's poorest continent, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner said on Tuesday. Rajendra K Pachauri, chairman of the United Nations panel of climate experts who shared the prize with former US Vice-President Al Gore last year, said the responsibility lay with wealthy developed nations to curb their carbon emissions.

Soaring prices are hitting rice, a staple food for more than half the earth's population, causing political unrest, supply bottlenecks, and sometimes draconian moves by governments to protect domestic stocks. Most of the 3 billion-plus people for whom rice is a diet basic are in Asia, but it is also important in areas of Africa and the Caribbean. Here are five facts about the cash-crop.

Responsible travel is not as recent a concept as some might think. Eco-tourism first emerged in the 1970s in response to such developments as the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and poaching in Africa. From those origins of low impact, conservation-driven responsible holidaymaking, a sizeable industry has been generated that touches every type of traveller.

Food prices are causing misery and strife around the world. Radical solutions are needed PICTURES of hunger usually show passive eyes and swollen bellies. The harvest fails because of war or strife; the onset of crisis is sudden and localised. Its burden falls on those already at the margin.

Seen from the porthole of a Super Puma helicopter skimming over the Atlantic, the future of African oil exploration appears for a second like a giant, fire-breathing dragon. Towering 12 storeys above the waters off Nigeria, Royal Dutch Shell's mammoth Bonga facility puffs a constant plume of flame as it sucks oil from below the ocean floor. Shell sees Bonga's start-up in November 2005 as heralding a new era of deepwater operations in Nigeria, where a series of recent reports have revealed the depths of its difficulties onshore in the swamps of the Niger Delta.