The Kamchatka peninsula , far east of Russia, is home to steaming geysers, simmering volcanoes, snow-capped mountains and a wide variety of plants and animals. The rare Steller’s sea eagle soars through its skies, while the only population of sea otters in the Western Pacific finds shelter along its coast.

The peninsula is recognized by UNESCO’s World Heritage List, and ranked by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) as one of the world’s most important ecological regions.

Read more: http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/ourwork/environmentandenergy/pr...

A vulnerable ethic minority village inside Cambodia’s remote Seima Protection Forest today became one of the first in Cambodia to receive a collective land title, which will help villagers fend off threats to their land and culture while also strengthening conservation goals.

Read more: http://www.newswise.com/articles/conservation-helps-secure-land-rights-in-cambodia

The objective of the Effective Management of the Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve Project for Malawi is to ensure effective management of the Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve through a sustainable management model focusing on its Bua watershed area. The project aims to develop and apply a new management approach with the involvement of border communities, public sector, private sector and civil society that focuses on strengthening national Protected Area (PA) management capacity.

Read more: http://go.worldbank.org/DIT36O26L0

Ensuring the future survival of the endangered pygmy elephant, orang utan and rhinoceros in the state of Sabah hinges on these steps: stop further fragmentation and conversion of forests; establish wildlife corridors, such as along riparian reserves to connect forest fragments; and stringent enforcement against poaching.

These are the key strategies highlighted in the five-year action plans to conserve the three species drafted by the Sabah Wildlife Department (SWD) and launched early this month at the two-day Sabah Wildlife Conservation Colloquium in Kota Kinabalu.

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http://thestar.com.my

A report released today identifies 13 of the richest and most vulnerable places in the Arctic Ocean that should be considered for protection as summer sea ice melts and industrial activity expands into newly accessible areas.

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http://iucn.org

The Lakes System in the Great Rift Valley in Kenya, the Ningaloo Coast in Australia and the Ogasawara Islands in Japan have been inscribed on the World Heritage List, following the recommendations of IUCN.

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http://iucn.org

These pages contain environmental data (biodiversity, human settlements, vulnerability, land, etc) presented in map format.

http://soer.deat.gov.za/30.html

Conservation scientists generally agree that many types of protected areas will be needed to protect tropical forests. But little is known of the comparative performance of inhabited and uninhabited reserves in slowing the most extreme form of forest disturbance: conversion to agriculture. We used satellite-based maps of land cover and fire occurrence in the Brazilian Amazon to compare the performance of large (>10,000 ha) uninhabited (parks) and inhabited (indigenous lands, extractive reserves, and national forests) reserves. Reserves significantly reduced both deforestation and fire.

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http://whrc.org

Since the Rio Conference of 1992, which declared the conservation of biodiversity and the creation of national parks to be priorities, resettlements resulting from conservation projects in Central Africa have been on the increase, as people living inside protected areas are relocated. Hardly any of these resettlements have been successful. There has been resistance to moving in the first place, and even returns to former villages inside the national parks. Resettlement is still the most common way to deal with people who happen to live in African national parks, but the risks which arise from these resettlements have led some scientists to rethink their position.

This article focuses on the Congo River Basin. It reviews the only ‘official’ relocation programme in the region (Korup National Park, Cameroon) and evaluates different approaches of national parks in Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo (Brazzaville) and Gabon. The author uses the Impoverishment Risk and Reconstruction model introduced by Cernea to evaluate the risks faced by the resettled populations, and to elaborate some social and environmental guidelines to mitigate them.

Download the article (299 KB, PDF)
http://people.ucsc.edu