The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) is one of the three conventions agreed at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. But from the very outset it has led a marginal existence, because industrialized countries feel far less concerned with desertification than developing countries. Moreover, the Convention?s targets are not binding and are open to a variety of interpretations by the Parties.The conflicting interests of environmental and
development policy are weakening its position further.

In the ten years since it came into being, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) has had little or no effect on the further encroachment of deserts. More than 80 countries have submitted National Action Programmes to combat desertification, but they appear to lack the financial and political commitment to implement them. What are the causes behind the UNCCD's weakness? How can the Convention be incorporated more effectively and efficiently into the architecture of international development?

The tsunami disaster on 26 December 2004 claimed more than 200,000 lives. It triggered an unprecedented outpouring of reconstruction assistance from both private and public donors.The prompt provision of emergency relief averted the threat of epidemics and prevented major movements of refugees out of the affected regions. However,many of the reconstruction measures failed due to poor coordination between the actors involved and the lack of expertise underlying some of the interventions.The reconstruction effort was also very slow to get off the ground.

2005 was a year of natural disasters.The impacts of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, Hurricanes Katrina and Stan, and the Pakistan earthquake prompted calls for better disaster prevention and preparedness systems. Nature's power renders us impotent, but human actions and omissions are clearly worsening the impacts of disasters in some cases.This is where risk reducing measures must lock in, as the last fifteen years of international disaster risk management show.

The devastating tsunami has shown in a tragic way the great vulnerability and exposed nature of coastal communities to natural calamities. It also has drawn global attention to the poor living conditions of fishing communities and the many threats to the sustainable use of fishery resources and coastal ecosystems. Post-tsunami rehabilitation offers the opportunity to build back better, improve and make more secure the lives of disadvantaged sections of the population and set fisheries and coastal resource use on a sustainable footing.

Post-tsunami reconstruction has been under way in the Indonesian province of Aceh for nearly two years. In the authors' view, swift coordination of goals and instruments has enabled positive synergies to be created between short-term development-oriented emergency aid and long-term recovery. In this way, and by means of a conflict-sensitive approach, the aim is to guarantee the sustainability of the reconstruction effort.

People-centred early warning systems empower communities to prepare for and confront the power of natural hazards. However, the efficiency of such systems is to be measured in terms of lives saved and reduction in losses, which is directly related to the execution of an anticipated response by the people and institutions once a warning is issued.This paper addresses traditional views on early warning systems, and what it takes to transform them into efficient, people-centred systems.

The series of dramatic natural events is never ending. 2005 again illustrated that natural disasters are unavoidable. For disaster prevention systems to function properly, investments in raising risk awareness are key.

Rural areas are not exempted from the impacts of globalisation. Global trends affecting agriculture are particularly significant in this respect. A number of options are available to developing countries in responding to these trends. Given the scarcity of resources it is important that they choose carefully. If they fail to respond, rural areas will become even more marginalized than they are already.

Two images have dominated the northern media in recent months.The first is of desolation in remote, rural areas in Africa affected by drought, conflict or famine, such as in Somalia, northern Kenya or Darfur, Sudan. The second is a different kind of desolation - that of urban squalor as portrayed in the film «The Constant Gardener». Nairobi's Kibera, which provides a backdrop for the film, is a bustling shantytown with a population of ca.

The rural areas of the South have undergone vital socio-economic and technological changes marked by globalisation, economic liberalization and political decentralization and by the information and communication sector. Will these changes suffice to improve the living standards of the rural population and lessen the urban-rural gap or will the rural sector remain in isolation and be also in ten years time home of the poor?

This Act makes provision for the establishment of the National Environment Council, the Lesotho Environment Authority, the National Environmental Fund and the Environmental Tribunal and provides in general for the conservation and management of the environment in Lesotho.The Act consists of 123 sections divided into 16 Parts: Preliminary (I); General Principles (II); Institutional Arrangements (III); Environmental Planning (IV); Environmental Impact Assessment, Audits and Monitoring (V); Environmental Quality Standards (VI); Pollution Control (VII); Environmental Management (VIII); Environm