What I learnt about the Australian bushfires living on the edge of the Sahara Desert

From 1981 to 1999 my family and I lived in Niger Republic, a borderland of the Sahara Desert. 

Tony Rinaudo prunes a thorny acacia tree, which helps
transform useless-looking "desert bushes" into potential trees.

I was in charge of a small reforestation project. The hard-earned lessons acquired during that period serve me to this day.

When I arrived in 1981, I was confronted by an environment on the cusp of ecological collapse and barely able to support life. 

The country was in undeclared crisis. In 1984, Niger faced famine. 

Severe drought and crop failure the previous year precipitated this crisis. 

Deforestation and land degradation over previous decades significantly exacerbated the impact. 

Read the ABC News story by Tony Rinaudo - “What I learnt about the Australian bushfires living on the edge of the Sahara Desert."

David Wallace-Wells on climate: ‘People should be scared – I'm scared’

 David Wallace-Wells: ‘I am motivated by fear.’ 

David Wallace-Wells’s apocalyptic depiction of a world made uninhabitable by climate chaos caused an outcry when it was published in New York magazine in 2017. Based on the worst-case scenarios foreseen by science, his article portrayed a world of drought, plague and famine, in which acidified oceans drown coastal homelands, dormant diseases are released from ancient ice, conflicts surge, economies collapse, human cognitive abilities decline and heat stress becomes more intolerable in New York City than in present-day Bahrain. Critics called this irresponsibly alarmist. Supporters said it was a long-overdue antidote to climate complacency. Whatever your view, it was among the best-read climate articles in US history. Now he is back with a book-length follow-up.

Read the story from The Guardian by Jonathan Watts - “David Wallace-Wells on climate: ‘People should be scared – I'm scared’.”

Wild dogs make a return to help restore the ecological balance

There are just 14 of them, far fewer than those that roamed Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park before the nearly two-decade civil war that started in the 1970s. As up to a million people lost their lives to violence and famine, much of the park's wildlife also was wiped out - including the wild dogs, an endangered species vulnerable to snares and disease.

In this undated photo supplied by Gorogosa Media,
a pack of wild dogs make their way down a road in Mozambique.

Now they have been re-introduced to Gorongosa, carnivores unleashed on plant eaters as part of an intricate conservation project that aims to restore a diverse ecosystem at the southern end of Africa's Great Rift Valley.

From The Age - “African wild dogs make comeback at Mozambican wildlife park.”