Africa

"Families near battery recycling plants face “dangerous" levels of lead in their blood and in soil, testing shows."

"Ongoing catastrophic rains in Eastern Africa have been worsened by human-caused climate change that made them up to two times more intense, an international team of climate scientists said Thursday."

"As the sun rises in the Bondeni-Jua Kali neighborhood on the outskirts of Kenya’s capital Nairobi, dozens of women and men step out of their corrugated iron homes with yellow jerricans, skip over pools of sewage and make their way to a nearby water vending station."

"The number of malaria cases rose again in 2022, propelled by flooding and warmer weather in areas once free of the illness."

"A new report from the nonprofit Global Witness validates civil society groups’ concerns about exploitative labor practices and environmental destruction associated with lithium mining. The report, released Tuesday, identifies multiple alleged incidents of corruption, unsafe working conditions, forced evictions, child labor and harmful environmental practices tied to lithium mining in Zimbabwe, Namibia and the Democratic Republic of Congo."

"Cheetahs are usually daytime hunters, but the speedy big cats will shift their activity toward dawn and dusk hours during warmer weather, a new study finds. Unfortunately for endangered cheetahs, that sets them up for more potential conflicts with mostly nocturnal competing predators such as lions and leopards, say the authors of research published Wednesday ... ."

"In South Sudan, war and semi-permanent flooding have left people to scavenge for food, with long-term consequences for their health".

"For many people in Benin, the forests empowered them before they were born, or in the first months of their lives. Barren women performed Voodoo rituals by sacred trees to get pregnant. Others were brought as newborns by parents seeking to ward off evil spirits."