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Tanzania digs in to fight drought Grass seeds, shovels, muscle and rain — the perfect ingredients to bring parched land in Kenya and Tanzania back to life. Village communities in Kenya and Tanzania are using a surprisingly simple, low-tech method to fight desertification. They dig semicircular depressions into the earth, so that it when it rains, water collects instead of evaporating…

Ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being at all ages is essential to sustainable development. Currently, the world is facing a global health crisis unlike any other — COVID-19 is spreading human suffering, destabilizing the global economy and upending the lives of billions of people around the globe. Before the pandemic, major progress was made in improving the health of…

Mid-to late-January saw the year’s first Calimas - dust storms in the Canary Islands region originating in the Sahara Desert. These were accompanied by Saharan dust transport events across the Canary Islands towards the North Atlantic. Wind and weather conditions can carry dust for thousands of miles before it finally settles on the surface, so it is important to accurately predict the direction…

5 February 2022 UN Affairs The UN Secretary-General on Saturday said that Africa was “a source of hope” for the world, highlighting the examples of the African Continental Free Trade Area and the Decade of Financial and Economic Inclusion for African Women. António Guterres also argued that, for the last 20 years, the African Union (AU) “has helped to bring this…

These 10 facts synthesized from LSS constitute hard truths that help to delineate the key challenges but also provide major opportunities for governing land systems for sustainability. Achieving sustainability through land systems is challenging precisely because multiple beliefs and values exist; because land systems are complex, with irreversibility and path dependence, large impacts of land…

An estimated 13 million people are waking up severely hungry every day in the Horn of Africa, as the region grapples with a major drought caused by the driest conditions since 1981, the World Food Programme (WFP) warned on Tuesday. Three consecutive failed rainy seasons in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, have decimated crops and caused abnormally high livestock deaths, while, shortages…