The Democratic Republic of Congo has kicked off Ebola vaccinations to stem an outbreak in the northwest city of Mbandaka, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday. 

Two people are known to have died so far in the city of over one million inhabitants where people live in close proximity to road, water and air links to the capital Kinshasa. 

The first death occurred on April 21 and the second on Tuesday, marking the central African country’s 14th Ebola outbreak.  

Around 200 doses of the rVSV-ZEBOV Ebola vaccine have been shipped to Mbandaka from the eastern city of Goma, with more to be delivered in coming days, the WHO said in a statement. 

So far 233 contacts have been identified and are being monitored, it added. 

Three vaccination teams are on the ground and will focus on reaching all people at high risk. 

“With effective vaccines at hand and the experience of the Democratic Republic of the Congo health workers in Ebola response, we can quickly change the course of this outbreak for the better,” WHO Africa Director Matshidiso Moeti said in the statement. 

Congo’s equatorial forests are a natural reservoir for the Ebola virus, which was discovered near the Ebola River in northern Congo in 1976. 

The country has seen 13 previous Ebola outbreaks, including one in 2018-2020 in the east that killed nearly 2,300 people, the second highest toll recorded in the history of the hemorrhagic fever. 

The most recent ended in December in the east and caused six deaths. Mbandaka, the capital of Equateur province, has also contended with outbreaks in 2018 and in 2020.

Genetic testing has shown that the current outbreak was a new “spillover event,” meaning it was transmitted from infected animals rather than linked to previous events. 
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Rising seas from climate change are forcing difficult choices for coastal communities around the world. The southern U.S. state of Louisiana plans to spend billions restoring land it has already lost to erosion. But the plan has winners and losers. Video: Steve Baragona, Arturo Martinez
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The United Nations is calling for better management to reduce the risks from rapidly increasing natural disasters largely triggered by climate change.  The U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction has issued its 2022 Global Assessment Report, which prescribes solutions to lessen the threatened risks.  

The report warns the world is set to face more frequent and extreme disasters and nations are ill-prepared to tackle the dangers.  

It says the number of natural disasters experienced over the last two decades is five times higher than in the previous three decades.  

Based on current trends, says Director of the U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction Ricardo Mena, the world will face some 560 disasters per year.

“Disasters have forced over a quarter-of-a-billion people into internal displacement,” said Mena. “So, that is much more than those that have been displaced by conflict and war each year on average between 2010 and 2020.” 

Over the last decade, the cost of disasters has amounted to around $170 billion a year.  The U.N. report notes the Asia-Pacific region bears the greatest share of economic loss, followed by the African region.

Mena says it is the poorest countries that are most impacted by disasters, forcing the most vulnerable into a spiral of destruction.

But he says that destructive spiral can be stopped if governments adopt better risk reduction policies and management strategies.

“Governments will need to invest more in disaster resilience, strengthening national budgets to protect people, and critical infrastructure,” Mena said. “But they also will have to strengthen efforts to avoid the creation of new risks as a result of risk-line decisions.”   

Mena says decisions people make on how they live, build, and invest can create new risks.  For example, he says, someone who builds a house in an earthquake-prone area without respecting the building codes is likely to have his house destroyed. A municipality that builds a school in a flood-prone area may see the building washed away. 

Making better decisions, Mena says, can lead to fewer disasters. 
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The first all-private astronaut team ever flown aboard the International Space Station (ISS) safely splashed down in the Atlantic off Florida’s coast on Monday, concluding a two-week science mission hailed as a landmark in commercialized human spaceflight.  

The SpaceX crew capsule carrying the four-man team, led by a retired NASA astronaut who is now vice president of the Texas company behind the mission, Axiom Space, parachuted into the sea after a 16-hour descent from orbit. 

The splashdown capped the latest, and most ambitious, in a recent series of rocket-powered expeditions bankrolled by private investment capital and wealthy passengers rather than taxpayer dollars six decades after the dawn of the space age. 

The mission’s crew was assembled, equipped and trained entirely at private expense by Axiom, a five-year-old venture based in Houston and headed by NASA’s former ISS program manager. Axiom also has contracted with NASA to build the first commercial addition to and ultimate replacement of the space station. 

SpaceX, the launch service founded by Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk, supplied the Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule that carried Axiom’s team to and from orbit, controlled the flight and handled the splashdown recovery. 

NASA, which has encouraged the further commercialization of space travel, furnished the launch site at its Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and assumed responsibility for the Axiom crew while they were aboard the space station. The U.S. space agency’s ISS crew members also pitched in to assist the private astronauts when needed. 

The multinational Axiom team was led by Spanish-born retired NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, 63, the company’s vice president for business development. His second-in-command was Larry Connor, 72, a technology entrepreneur and aerobatics aviator from Ohio designated the mission pilot. 

Joining them as “mission specialists” were investor-philanthropist and former Israeli fighter pilot Eytan Stibbe, 64, and Canadian businessman and philanthropist Mark Pathy, 52.  

Connor, Stibbe and Pathy flew as customers of Axiom, which charges $50 million to $60 million per seat for such flights, according to Mo Islam, head of research for the investment firm Republic Capital, which holds stakes in both Axiom and SpaceX. 

Fiery reentry 

The splashdown, carried live by an Axiom-SpaceX webcast, was originally planned for last Wednesday, but the return flight was delayed, and the mission was extended to about a week due to windy weather. The potential costs of such an extension were factored into Axiom’s contracts with NASA and its customers, so none of the parties bore any additional charges, the company said. 

The return from orbit followed a reentry plunge through Earth’s atmosphere generating frictional heat that sends temperatures surrounding the outside of the capsule soaring to 1,927 degrees Celsius. 

Applause was heard from the SpaceX flight control center in suburban Los Angeles as parachutes billowed open above the capsule in the final stage of its descent — slowing its fall to about 24 kilometers per hour — and again as the craft hit the water off the coast of Jacksonville. 

In less than an hour, the heat-scorched Crew Dragon was hoisted onto a recovery ship before the capsule’s side hatch was opened and the four astronauts, garbed in helmeted white-and-black spacesuits, were helped out one by one onto the deck. All were visibly unsteady on their feet from over two weeks spent in a weightless environment. 

Each received a quick onboard checkup before they were flown back to Florida for more thorough medical evaluations. 

“Everybody looks great and is doing reasonably well,” Axiom operations director Derek Hassmann told a post-splashdown news briefing, describing the astronauts as being “in great spirits.”  

‘Low-Earth orbit economy’ 

Axiom, SpaceX, and NASA have touted the occasion as a milestone in the expansion of privately funded space-based commerce, constituting what industry insiders call the “low-Earth orbit economy,” or “LEO economy” for short. 

“We proved that we can prepare the crew in a way that makes them effective and productive in orbit,” Hassmann said. “What it demonstrates to the world is that there is a new avenue to get to low-Earth orbit.” 

Launched on April 8, the Axiom team spent 17 days in orbit, 15 of those aboard the space station with the seven regular, government-paid ISS crew members: three American astronauts, a German astronaut and three Russian cosmonauts. 

The ISS has hosted several wealthy space tourists from time to time over the years. 

But the Axiom quartet was the first all-commercial team ever welcomed to the space station as working astronauts, bringing with them 25 science and biomedical experiments to conduct in orbit. The package included research on brain health, cardiac stem cells, cancer and aging, as well as a technology demonstration to produce optics using the surface tension of fluids in microgravity. 

It was the sixth human spaceflight for SpaceX in nearly two years, following four NASA astronaut missions to the ISS and the “Inspiration 4” flight in September that sent an all-private crew into Earth orbit for the first time, though not to the space station. 

SpaceX has been hired to fly three more Axiom astronaut missions to ISS over the next two years. 
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One in four children in Latin America and the Caribbean does not have vaccine protection against three potentially deadly diseases, a U.N. report said Monday, warning of plummeting inoculation rates. 

While 90% of children in the region in 2015 had received the vaccine for diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough (DTP3), by 2020 coverage had dropped to three-quarters, according to the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), a regional office of the World Health Organization.  

This means that some 2.5 million children were not fully protected — and 1.5 million of them have not had even one dose in the three-shot regimen. 

Globally, according to WHO, 17.1 million infants did not receive an initial dose of the DTP3 vaccine in 2020, and another 5.6 million were only partially jabbed. 

Outbreaks of preventable diseases “have already occurred” in Latin America and the Caribbean, the agencies said. 

In 2013, only five people in the region contracted diphtheria — a bacterial disease that can cause breathing difficulties, heart failure and potentially death. 

Five years later, the number was nearly 900. 

There has also been a rise in cases of measles — another disease that can be prevented with inoculation — from nearly 500 cases in 2013 to more than 23,000 in 2019, said the statement. 

“The decline in vaccination rates in the region is alarming,” said UNICEF regional director Jean Gough. 

The reasons were multifold.  

“The context in the region has changed in the last five years. Governments have focused their attention on other emerging public health issues such as Zika, chikungunya and more recently COVID-19,” UNICEF neonatal expert Ralph Midy told AFP.  

“The existence of migrant populations that are difficult to locate and do not always have access to regular health services, in addition to people living in isolated or hard-to-reach areas, also hinders the vaccination process,” Midy said. 

The downward trend started even before the COVID-19 epidemic, which worsened the situation by interrupting primary health care services and causing some people to avoid clinics and hospitals for fear of the virus. 

“As countries recover from the pandemic, immediate actions are needed to prevent (vaccine) coverage rates from further dropping, because the re-emergence of disease outbreaks poses a serious risk to all of society,” said Gough. 

 
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In advance of World Malaria Day, the World Health Organization recommends the expanded use of the first malaria vaccine, calling it a potential game changer in the fight against malaria.

Malaria is a preventable, treatable disease.  Yet, every year, malaria sickens more than 200 million people and kills more than 600,000.  Most of these deaths, nearly half a million, are among young children in Africa.  That means every 60 seconds a child dies of malaria.

Despite this bleak news, the outlook for malaria control is promising, thanks to the development of the world’s first malaria vaccine.  The World Health Organization calls the achievement a historic breakthrough for science.

A pilot program was started in 2019 in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi.  Since then, the World Health Organization reports more than a million children in the three countries have received the malaria vaccine.

Mary Hamel is Head of WHOs Malaria Vaccine Implementation Program.  She said the two-year pilot program has shown the vaccine is safe, feasible to deliver and reduces deadly severe malaria.

“We saw a 30% drop in children being brought to the hospitals with deadly, severe malaria.  And we also saw almost a 10% reduction in all caused child mortality.  If the vaccine is widely deployed, it is estimated that it could save an additional 40 to 80,000 child lives each year,” she said.

WHO reports Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance will provide more than $155 million to support expanded introduction of the malaria vaccine for Gavi-eligible countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

The vaccine against malaria was under development before the COVID-19 vaccine was produced.  Hamel said WHO has learned a lot of lessons from that effort, which could be used in the development of future malaria vaccines.

“We know there have been new platforms that came forward since the COVID vaccine, including the mRNA platform and now the developers of one of the mRNA vaccines is looking forward to developing a malaria vaccine using that same platform,” she said.

Last July, BioNTech, manufacturer of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, announced it wants to build on that success by developing a malaria vaccine using mRNA technology.  The pharmaceutical company says it aims to start clinical trials by the end of this year.
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Climate change and habitat loss from big agriculture are combining to swat down global insect populations, with each problem making the other worse, a new study finds.

While insects may bug people at times, they also are key in pollinating plants to feed people, making soil more fertile and they include beautiful butterflies and fireflies. Scientists have noticed a dramatic drop both in total bug numbers and diversity of insect species, calling it a slow-motion death by 1,000 cuts. Those cuts include pesticides and light pollution.

Big single-crop agriculture that leaves less habitat and leafy food for bugs plus higher temperatures from climate change are huge problems for insects, but a new study in the journal Nature Wednesday based on more than 750,000 samples of 18,000 different species of insects says it’s not just those two threats acting on their own. It’s how habitat loss and climate change interact that really smashes bug populations.

In about half the cases where numbers of insects had plummeted, researchers found climate change and habitat loss from agriculture magnifying each other. In more than a quarter of the cases of biodiversity loss, meaning fewer species, the same dynamic was at work.

“We know insects are under threat. We’re now getting a much bigger handle on what they are threatened by and how much,” said study author Charlotte Outhwaite, an ecologist at the University College of London.

“In this case, the habitat loss and climate change can often be worse than if they were acting on their own, as one can make the impact of the other worse and vice versa,” Outhwaite said. “We’re missing part of the picture if we are only looking at these things individually.”

For example, monoculture agriculture often reduces tree shading, making it hotter in a given spot. On top of that comes climate change, she said. Then insects that need heat relief or need to move north for cooler climates can run into problems with lack of proper habitat from large farms.

It’s especially a problem in countries like Indonesia and Brazil, where forests are being cleared and temperatures are heating up higher than other parts of the globe, Outhwaite said.

That’s hard on insects like the pesky midge.

“Cocoa is pollinated primarily by midges and people don’t like midges. You know they’re the annoying ones that bite you, they pester you at picnics,” Outhwaite said. “But if you like chocolate you should be appreciative because without them we would have a lot less cocoa.”

The same can be said about bees, which are having a hard time with warming from climate change and single-crop farming, Outhwaite said.

Insect pollinators are responsible for about one-third of the human diet, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And 2 out of 5 species of invertebrate pollinators, such as bees and butterflies, are on the path toward extinction, a 2016 United Nations science report said.

What makes this study important is that it’s the first to link climate change and industrialized agriculture together in explaining harm to insects, said University of Connecticut entomologist David Wagner, who wasn’t part of the study. Because the study used so many different samples and species and looked around the world, that gives its findings more credibility, Wagner said.
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The World Health Organization said on Saturday that at least one child death had been reported following an increase of acute hepatitis of unknown origin in children, and that at least 169 cases had been reported in children in 12 countries.

The WHO issued the figures as health authorities around the world investigate a mysterious increase in severe cases of hepatitis — inflammation of the liver — in young children.

The WHO said that as of April 21 acute cases of hepatitis of unknown origin had been reported in the United Kingdom, the United States, Spain, Israel, Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands, Italy, Norway, France, Romania and Belgium. It said 114 of the 169 cases were in the United Kingdom alone.

The cases reported were in children aged from 1 month to 16 years, and 17 had required liver transplantation, it said. It gave no details of the death that it said had been reported and did not say where it occurred.

The WHO said a common cold virus known as an adenovirus had been detected in at least 74 cases. COVID-19 infection was identified in 20 of those tested and 19 cases were detected with a COVID-19 and adenovirus co-infection, it said.

The WHO said it was closely monitoring the situation and working with British health authorities, other member states and partners.

U.S. health officials have sent out a nationwide alert warning doctors to be on the lookout for symptoms of pediatric hepatitis, possibly linked with a cold virus, as part of a wider probe into unexplained cases of severe liver inflammation in young children.
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Maggie Mulligan said her dogs could sense the panic while she and her husband packed them up, agonized over having to leave horses behind and fled a fast-moving wildfire barreling toward their home in northeast New Mexico. 

“We don’t know what’s next,” she said. “We don’t know if we can go back to the horses.” 

Mulligan and her husband, Bill Gombas, 67, were among the anxious residents who hurriedly packed up and evacuated their homes Friday ahead of ominous Western wildfires fueled by tinder-dry conditions and ferocious winds. 

Over a dozen sizable fires were burning in Arizona and New Mexico, destroying dozens of homes and as of Saturday burning more than 174 square miles (451 square kilometers). 

Winds that howled Friday remained a concern Saturday in northern New Mexico where two fires merged and quadrupled in size to a combined 66 square miles (171 square kilometers) in the mountains and grassland northwest of Las Vegas. 

The merged fires burned some structures, but no figures were available, said fire information officer Mike Johnson. “They were able to save some structures and we know we lost other structures that we weren’t able to defend.” 

Wind-blown clouds of dust and plumes of smoke obscured the skies near the fires, said Jesus Romero, assistant county manager for San Miguel County. “All the ugliness that spring in New Mexico brings — that’s what they’re dealing in.” 

An estimated 500 homes in San Miguel were in rural areas of Mora and San Miguel counties covered by evacuation orders or warning notices, Romero said. 

Elsewhere in the region, the fire danger in the Denver area Friday was the highest it had been in over a decade, according to the National Weather Service, because of unseasonable temperatures in the 80s combined with strong winds and very dry conditions. 

In Arizona, a Flagstaff-area fire burned 30 homes and numerous other buildings when the flames blew through rural neighborhoods Tuesday. 

A shift in wind had crews working Saturday to keep the fire from moving up mountain slopes or toward homes in rural neighborhoods near areas that burned Tuesday, fire information officer Dick Fleishman said. “It has got us a little concerned.” 

In northern New Mexico, winds Friday gusted up to 75 mph (120 kph), shrouding the Rio Grande Valley with dust and pushing flames through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the north. 

A wall of smoke stretched from the wilderness just east of Santa Fe about 50 miles (80 km) to the northeast where ranchers and other rural inhabitants were abruptly told to leave by law enforcement. 

Mulligan, 68, of Ledoux, a dog breeder, said her dog Liam “was a nervous wreck” when a sheriff came to their house Friday afternoon and told them they had to leave. 

They packed nine dogs and five puppies into an SUV and an old blue Cadillac. They considered dropping the horses off at a local fairgrounds, but they decided it was in the same path of the burning fire as their home and more likely to burn. 

“There’s water in their pasture, and there’s hay. So we’ll see what happens,” Mulligan said. 

Lena Atencio and her husband, whose family has lived in the nearby Rociada area for five generations, got out Friday as winds kicked up. She said most people were taking the threat seriously. 

“As a community, as a whole, everybody is just pulling together to support each other and just take care of the things we need to now. And then at that point, it’s in God’s hands,” she said as the wind howled miles away in the community of Las Vegas, New Mexico, where evacuees were gathering. 

The town of Cimarron and the headquarters of the Philmont Scout Ranch, owned and operated by the Boy Scouts of America, were preparing to flee if necessary. The scout ranch attracts thousands of summer visitors, but officials said no scouts were on the property. 

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed emergency declarations for four counties over the fires. 

Near the Flagstaff-area fire, Kelly Morgan was among neighbors at the edge of the evacuation zone who did not leave. She and her husband have lived through wildfires before, she said, and they are prepared if winds shift and flames race toward the home they moved into three years ago. 

“Unfortunately, it’s not something new to us … but I hate seeing it when people are affected the way they are right now,” she said. “It’s sad. It’s a very sad time. But as a community, we’ve really come together.” 
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The number of women in Lebanon dying from pregnancy-related complications has nearly tripled amid a crushing three-year economic crisis that has seen doctors and midwives leave the country, the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF said Wednesday.

The crisis is also affecting children, especially among Syrian refugees who have fled over the border into Lebanon.

UNICEF said a third of children could not access health care by October 2021, and the number of children who die within the first four weeks after birth “increased dramatically among refugees in four provinces assessed, from 65 neonatal deaths in the first quarter of 2020 to 137 in the third quarter.”

Lebanon hosts 1.5 million Syrian refugees, making up about a quarter of the population, according to official estimates.

“Repeatedly, anguished parents and families are unable to access basic health care for their children“ as many dedicated health workers struggle to keep operations running during the crisis,” said Ettie Higgins, UNICEF Lebanon representative.

Some 40% of doctors, including those that work specifically with children and women, have left the country, as well as some 30% of midwives, UNICEF said, diminishing the quality of services in a country formerly seen as a regional health care hub.

“Lebanon had achieved remarkable success in reducing maternal deaths, but numbers rose again between 2019 and 2021, from 13.7 to 37 deaths per 100,000 live births,” the agency said in a report. It did not give the raw numbers.

Faysal al-Kak, coordinator of Lebanon’s National Committee on Safe Motherhood, said the number of maternal deaths had spiked largely due to the coronavirus delta variant in 2021 but said the crisis was also a factor.

“The Lebanese crisis is a strong variable — maybe the mom is not visiting enough, afraid of going to the doctor because it costs money. It gave women a sense that ‘I can’t go to the doctor,'” he told Reuters.

“Delta and the low vaccination rate — in addition to the compounded crisis that we live in — could have affected indirectly the accessibility, cost, and transportation.”

The rising cost of transportation and services due to the collapse of the country’s currency and the removal of most subsidies on fuel and medicine has left healthcare out of reach for many, UNICEF said.

Childhood vaccination rates have declined, leaving hundreds of thousands of children vulnerable to preventable diseases such as measles and pneumonia.
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Authorities in Pakistan have confirmed the first case of wild polio virus in more than a year, dealing a setback to the country’s progress against the highly infectious disease.

A 15-month-old boy was paralyzed by the virus in the turbulent North Waziristan district, which borders Afghanistan, according to an official announcement Friday.

“This is, of course, a tragedy for the child and his family and it is also very unfortunate both for Pakistan and polio eradication efforts all over the world,” said Aamir Ashraf, a top health ministry official in Islamabad. “We are disappointed but not deterred.”

Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan are the only two countries where polio continues to paralyze children, although case numbers in recent years have significantly dropped on both sides of the border. 

The last time a child was paralyzed in Pakistan was in January 2021. There is one wild polio virus infection reported in Afghanistan this year and four in 2021.

Ashraf said health officials are conducting a thorough investigation into the detection of the polio case, and emergency immunization campaigns are underway to prevent further spread of the virus in the country of about 220 million people. 

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s office said he will chair an emergency meeting Monday of a national task force for polio eradication to review eradication efforts.

Polio crippled approximately 20,000 Pakistani children a year in the early 1990s.

The latest case in Pakistan has raised to three the global number of polio infections in 2022, including one in Malawi, according to data from the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI).

The GPEI confirmed in February that Malawi had detected a case of type 1 wild poliovirus (WPV1) in a 3-year-old child suffering from paralysis in Lilongwe. It noted that the virus was “genetically linked to WPV1 that was detected in Pakistan’s southern Sindh province in 2019. 

The detection does not affect the World Health Organization African Region’s wild poliovirus-free certification status officially marked in August 2020, according to the GPEI.
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A new case of Ebola has been confirmed in northwestern Democratic Republic of Congo, the National Institute of Biomedical Research said Saturday, four months after the end of the country’s last outbreak.

The case, a 31-year-old male, was detected in the city of Mbandaka, capital of Congo’s Equateur province, the institute said. A health ministry spokesperson confirmed the discovery.

The patient began showing symptoms on April 5 but did not seek treatment for more than a week. He was admitted to an Ebola treatment center on April 21 and died later that day, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a statement.

“Time is not on our side,” said Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO’s Regional Director for Africa.”The disease has had a two-week head start and we are now playing catch-up.”

Mbandaka, a crowded trading hub on the banks of the Congo River, has contended with two previous outbreaks — in 2018 and in 2020. It is a city where people live in close proximity, with road, water and air links to the capital Kinshasa.

The WHO said that efforts to contain the disease are already underway in Mbandaka, and that a vaccination campaign will begin in the coming days.

Congo has seen 13 previous outbreaks of Ebola, including one in 2018-2020 in the east that killed nearly 2,300 people, the second highest toll recorded in the history of the hemorrhagic fever.

The last outbreak, also in the east, infected 11 people between October and December and killed six of them.
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Devastating floods in South Africa this week, as well as other extreme weather events across the continent linked to human-caused climate change, are putting marine and terrestrial wildlife species at risk, according to biodiversity experts. 

Africa has already faced several climate-related woes in the past year: the ongoing fatal floods follow unrelenting cyclones in the south, extreme temperatures in western and northern regions, and a debilitating drought which is currently afflicting eastern, central and the Horn of Africa. 

Conservation and wildlife groups say it’s critical to protect species from these climate change-related weather events. 

“Climate change is disrupting ecosystems and affecting the survival and suitability of species to live in their usual habitats,” said Shyla Raghav, who heads the climate change division at Conservation International. “Massive disruption to ecological stability will occur if adequate adaptation and mitigation measures are not implemented. There is need to incorporate climate proofing of our protected areas. That way we boost nature’s ability for resilience.” 

Multiple species, including Africa’s famed “big-five” land animals and other terrestrial and marine life, are vulnerable to significant population loss. Ornithologist Paul Matiku, who heads the biodiversity watch group Nature Kenya, says shifting rainfall patterns and increased temperatures are having serious consequences for bird populations. 

“Climate change causes seasonal variability in rainfall, temperature and food for birds. As such breeding aborts and bird populations automatically reduce over time,” Matiku said. “Wetland birds are affected by reducing water levels due to droughts. The Sahara Desert gets hotter, and some migratory birds die along their migratory routes due to high temperatures and dehydration.” He added that some birds are so weak from taxing migratory journeys that they are no longer breeding. 

Ecosystems that thrive along Africa’s popular white sandy beaches are also particularly vulnerable, according to Ibidun Adelekan, a geography professor at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. Africa’s coasts are at risk of coral reef ecosystem collapse due to bleaching, potential saltwater intrusion on freshwater aquifers, and more intense tropical cyclones. 

Adelekan warned that greater damage to Africa’s coastal biodiversity will also have considerable consequences for populations in towns and cities along its shores. “Persistent deprivation of terrestrial and marine ecosystems by human actions is leading to increased vulnerability of coastal and island communities to climate impacts,” she told the Associated Press. 

Her concerns are echoed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who earlier this year cautioned that African coasts with “high proportion of informal settlements and small island states are exposed and highly vulnerable to climate change.” 

But scientists are hopeful that improved coastal management of marine protected areas and better restrictions on the fishing industry will curb impacts on marine biodiversity. 

“Our research indicates that the future of coral reefs will be much better if fisheries restrictions and protected areas are applied effectively throughout the region,” said Tim McClanahan, a senior conservation zoologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, who studied over 100 locations in the western Indian Ocean. 

“While climate change may be outside of local control, the bad outcomes will be reduced if fisheries manage to reduce detrimental impacts on the coral reefs.” 

 
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