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Mali’s elephants, Africa’s northernmost herd and adapted to life in the country’s harsh desert, were in desperate need of protection. The animals live in an unforgiving landscape southeast of Timbuktu, enduring sandstorms and blistering temperatures. To survive, they trek in search of food and water across what is thought to be the biggest migratory range of their species, more than 12,400 square miles. But it wasn’t only climate change endangering the elephants. It was also poachers. They were being slaughtered in staggering numbers as ivory traffickers took advantage of a security vacuum in the region, with 163 killed since 2012,...

In the 1970s, Kenya had about six times as many elephants as Zimbabwe, and today Zimbabwe has three times more elephants than Kenya (see chart).  What happened that caused the dramatic reversal in elephant populations in the two African countries?  Terry Anderson and Shawn Regan of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) explain in their excellent article "Shoot an Elephant, Save a Community": "Anti-hunting groups succeeded in getting Kenya to ban all hunting in 1977. Since then, its population of large wild animals has declined between 60 and 70 percent. The country’s elephant population declined from 167,000 in...

This Ted Talk should be required viewing by every member of the BLM and the EPA. The first couple of minutes he starts off talking like a typical climatologist, mentioning fossil fuels. But then he takes an interesting turn. He's an Ecologist originally from Africa. And he's actually been responsible for implementing a number of land management policies throughout his career that have failed miserably. His conclusions on land management end up being the opposite of what we commonly hear. And what's more, he's had a chance to implement those solutions on 5 different continents and has seen outstanding success.

Experts and researchers on Saturday introduced new plant technology at a conference held on Saturday in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, to harness desertification of China. Juncao, a kind of herbaceous herb, can be cultivated as substrate for edible and medicinal fungi, which may make great strides in sand control and reduce desertification thanks to the efforts of Lin Zhanxi, professor at Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, and his team. Lin started working with Juncao in 1986 and developed his system over more than two decades of research and innovation. In April, sand control trials using Juncao were approved...

...the Garamantes - a mysterious desert people of Greco-Roman date (broadly 500 BC AD 500)... Inhabiting a region that had already been for several thousand years a hyper-arid desert environment, with negligible rainfall, elevated summer temperatures and blistering expanses of barren sand and rock... have long been an enigma. They were depicted by Roman sources as ungovernable nomadic barbarians, who raided the settled agricultural zone and cities of the Mediterranean littoral. Following up earlier work by Daniels, the current project allows a different picture of the Garamantes to be drawn. Archaeological evidence shows them to have been a complex and...

Britain's airspace was closed under false pretences, with satellite images revealing there was no doomsday volcanic ash cloud over the entire country. Skies fell quiet for six days, leaving as many as 500,000 Britons stranded overseas and costing airlines hundreds of millions of pounds. Estimates put the number of Britons still stuck abroad at 35,000. However, new evidence shows there was no all-encompassing cloud and, where dust was present, it was often so thin that it posed no risk. The satellite images demonstrate that the skies were largely clear, which will not surprise the millions who enjoyed the fine, hot...

Wet spells in the Sahara may have opened the door for early human migration. According to new evidence, water-dependent trees and shrubs grew there between 120,000 and 45,000 years ago. This suggests that changes in the weather helped early humans cross the desert on their way out of Africa... While about 40 per cent of hydrocarbons in today's dust come from water-dependent plants, this rose to 60 per cent, first between 120,000 and 110,000 ago and again from 50,000 to 45,000 years ago. So the region seemed to be in the grip of unusually wet spells at the time. That...

A plan to build a 6,000km-long wall across the Sahara Desert to stop the spread of the desert has been outlined. The barrier - formed by solidifying sand dunes - would stretch from Mauritania in the west of Africa to Djibouti in the east. The plan was put forward by architect Magnus Larsson at the TED Global conference in Oxford. A 2007 UN study described desertification as "the greatest environmental challenge of our times".

On top of the world! Sensational collection of satellite images captures Earth's natural wonders from space CHER THORNHILL 25th July 2009 For decades, man has gazed up at the stars and marvelled at the wonders of the universe. But, as this amazing selection of images shows, there are many mind-blowing sights to behold from the other direction. [Pics in URL] Pictures taken by astronauts and Nasa satellites give a fascinating bird's-eye view of Earth's natural wonders - including hurricanes, volcanoes and other powerful weather formations - from space. A mosaic of Nasa satellite images gives the most detailed true-colour image...

The African source of the Amazon's fertilizer Sid Perkins In the winter months in the Northern Hemisphere, massive dust storms from the African Sahara waft southwest across the Atlantic to drop tons of vital minerals on the Amazon basin in South America. Now, scientists have pinpointed the source of many of those dust storms and estimated their dust content. ON THE WAY. Satellite photo shows dust (arrow), bound for the Amazon, blowing away from the Sahara's Bodélé depression. NASA The Amazonian rainforest depends on Saharan dust for many of its nutrients, including iron and phosphorus (SN: 9/29/01, p. 200: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20010929/bob9.asp)....

DESERTIFICATION threatens to drive millions of people from their homes in coming decades while vast dust storms can damage the health of people continents away, an international report said today. "Desertification has emerged as a global problem affecting everyone," said Zafar Adeel, assistant director of the UN University's water academy and a lead author of a report drawing on the work of 1360 scientists in 95 nations. Two billion people live in drylands vulnerable to desertification, ranging from northern Africa to swathes of central Asia, he said. And storms can lift dust from the Sahara Desert, for instance, and cause...

Could dandruff be altering the world’s climate? Along with fur, algae, pollen, fungi, bacteria, viruses and various other “bio-aerosols” wafting around in the atmosphere, it may well be. A global study has found that tiny fragments of biological detritus are a major component of the atmosphere, controlling the weather and forming a previously hidden microbial metropolis in the skies. Besides their climatic influence, they may even be spreading diseases across the globe. Scientists have known for some time that aerosols of soot, dust and ash can influence climate by reflecting or absorbing the Sun’s rays and by providing the condensation...

As little as 30 years ago the talk wasn’t about global warming, it was about an imminent ice age. Is an ice age likely? Even possible? Consider this: There have been more than 20 glacial advances, or ice ages, in just the last two million years. And we know from geological evidence that each glaciation lasted anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 years—no one knows why the disparity—separated by warm periods that last some 10,000 to 15,000 years. What we can be reasonably sure of is that we’re now in one of the warm periods, and this one is already 13,000...

Out Of AfricaDust, the Thermostat How tiny airborne particles manipulate global climate Sid Perkins On April 15, 1998, Mongolia's Gobi Desert lay between an area of low atmospheric pressure on the eastern end of the country and a zone of high pressure to the west. As swift winds rushed across the desert floor, they lofted sand and dust into the heart of a storm system racing southward into China. During the next 2 days, a yellow, muddy, acidic rain fell in a wide swath that covered Beijing and the Korean peninsula. On April 16, 1998, a strong storm system passing ...

OSLO (Reuters) - The once-green Sahara turned to desert over thousands of years rather than in an abrupt shift as previously believed, according to a study on Thursday that may help understanding of future climate changes. And there are now signs of a tiny shift back towards greener conditions in parts of the Sahara, apparently because of OSLO (Reuters) - The once-green Sahara turned to desert over thousands of years rather than in an abrupt shift as previously believed, according to a study on Thursday that may help understanding of future climate changes. And there are now signs of a...

World's poorest must change lifestyles as Earth dries up.Many of the world's dry regions, currently home to some 2.1 billion people, are in danger of becoming useless for growing food, according to the latest in a series of reports on the world's ecosystems. It blames climate change and human activities. The report's authors estimate that 10-20% of these 'drylands' have already lost some plant life or economic use, and they say the situation is getting worse. Hundreds of thousands of people will be in need of new homes and lifestyles over the next 30 years, they estimate. The report, titled...

The U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification was ratified by the U.S. Senate on October 18, but few Senators yet know that it has been ratified. Senator Craig Thomas (R-WY) introduced a package of 34 treaties, all of which were ratified by a show of hands -- no recorded vote.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) The world is turning to dust, with lands the size of Rhode Island becoming desert wasteland every year and the problem threatening to send millions of people fleeing to greener countries, the United Nations says. One-third of the Earth's surface is at risk, driving people into cities and destroying agriculture in vast swaths of Africa. Thirty-one percent of Spain is threatened, while China has lost 36,000 square miles to desert an area the size of Indiana since the 1950s. This week the United Nations marks the 10th anniversary of the Convention to Combat Desertification, a plan aimed...

Kazakh dam condemns most of the shrunken Aral Sea to oblivion Desperate step after water row with Uzbeks Paul Brown, environment correspondent Wednesday October 29, 2003 The Guardian (UK) A seven-mile dam is being built across a small northern section of the shrunken Aral Sea in Central Asia, which is described as the world's worst environmental disaster. The saline inland sea, divided between the former Soviet states of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, has been drying out for 25 years, since the USSR began a vast irrigation scheme drawing water from its two tributary rivers to grow cotton and rice in the...