On March 28th, 2023, the Nigerian Senate granted approval for the creation of 10 new National Parks within the country. The decision was made following the adoption of a motion on the National Park declaration Order 22, which was presented by Sen. Gobir Abdullahi (APC-Sokoto) during plenary. Abdullahi explained that President Muhammadu Buhari had sent…
March 3rd marks the annual World Wildlife Day, a day set aside by the United Nations to celebrate and raise awareness about the world’s wild animals and plants, and the importance of protecting their habitats. World Wildlife Day celebrates the beauty, richness, diversity and the contribution that wild animals and plants make to our world…
A recent study conducted by researchers of Saint Louis University (USA) and the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences (France) has found that elephant populations play a crucial role in regulating the Earth’s atmosphere through their impact on the carbon cycle. The research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, highlights…
South African ungulates, or hooved mammals, react differently to different species of predators. Experiments by a research team have demonstrated that the behavioural responses of ungulates to large predators can shape ecosystem structure and function. Most such studies have concentrated on the impacts of either just one large carnivore, or all as a whole, rather…
In the past weeks, we have seen many headlines about the Democratic Republic of Congo government’s decision to auction 27 oil and 3 gas blocks in some of the most biodiverse areas of this vast country. National and international civil society organisations are warning about the environmental damage this could cause to peatlands, to National…
Ngo Manyama Déborah, a fresh fish trader, is still at the popular Youpwe fish market in Douala, Cameroon, at 3 p.m. on Friday, May 27. She complaints she’s been waiting for buyers who haven’t shown up. Buyers are being scared away by the high prices of fish, fuelled by a scarcity of fish. “I need…
A University of Cape Town (UCT) study set out to investigate the effect of climate change on the breeding success of southern yellow-billed hornbills in the Kalahari Desert found that they could be wiped out by 2027. The study found that the breeding success of the hornbills collapsed over a decade-long monitoring period (2008 –…
A major challenge in evolutionary science has been the reconstruction of the evolution of language in the world. Given that language does not fossilise, a key line of research has been focusing on comparing the communication systems of animals with that of humans. Unique to human language is the capacity to flexibly recombine a limited…
Akashinga or The Brave Ones, is a conservation anti-poaching unit founded on the principles of women’s empowerment as the main driver for social, economic and environmental change. Despite their worldly anti-poaching popularity, what makes Akashinga tilt the scale of Zimbabwe’s perceived gender roles, to bravely defeat poachers and bravely face their own cultural values? The…
Poaching rare wildlife for teeth, tusks, fur, horns and other body parts is a crime which threatens many species with extinction, but the evidence which could incriminate traffickers is often difficult to access, hard to interpret, or piecemeal. To discover more about the criminal networks sustaining this trade, researchers in the US, Kenya and Singapore…