Environmentalist

  As African nations push to develop their forest economies, a fundamental questions hangs over chainsaw and conservation plan: can communities and ecosystems both thrive?   For a forest-based economy to flourish in Africa, two things must coexist: the forest itself, and the means to derive sustainable value from it. Yet across the continent, the relationship between those two imperatives has never been more fraught or more urgent. From the dense rainforests of the Congo Basin, second only to the Amazon in size, to the miombo woodlands stretching across East and Southern Africa, the continent holds some of the world’s most vital forest ecosystems. These forests absorb carbon, regulate rainfall, harbour extraordinary biodiversity, and sustain tens of millions of rural livelihoods. They are, by any measure, priceless. And yet, they are under pressure from logging, charcoal production, agricultural expansion, and climate change. The central moral question of our time in A...

  By Brian Onali Nduw Walk through a coastal neighbourhood at high tide, and you’ll find it: nuisance flooding that creeps up driveways. Lingers in streets. And has become less an anomaly than a calendar event. It is no longer a question of  if  the water will rise, but  when . And how often. This is not speculation. It is the leading edge of sea-level rise, lapping at the foundations of communities that were never designed to be tidal. Inland, the signs are just as unmistakable. The air carries a chemical weight. What falls from the sky is not always water anymore. It is acid. Fed by emissions that have accumulated in the atmosphere for decades. Beneath that sky, once-hardy plants brown and wilt. Some species are vanishing entirely. Not dramatically, but silently, slipping into extinction before most of us ever learn their names. The future, by these measures, ain’t exciting. A crisis measured in degrees and breaths The language of climate science is often abstract:...