Climate change affecting Kenya's coffee output

ENN, February 11, 2010

Climate change has affected Kenyan coffee production through unpredictable rainfall patterns and excessive droughts, making crop management and disease control a nightmare, a researcher said on Thursday.
Intermittent rainfall in the 2007/08 crop year, for example, caused a terrible bout of the Coffee Berry Disease that cut Kenyan output 23 percent to 42,000 metric tons as farmers were caught out by rains and did not protect their crop in time. Read more...

Kenya's lions could vanish within 10 years

ENN, August 20, 2009

Kenya has been losing 100 lions a year for the past seven years, leaving the country with just 2000 of its famous big cats, says the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) — which concludes the country could have no wild lions at all in 20 years. Conservationists have blamed habitat destruction, disease and conflict with humans for the population collapse.
But Laurence Frank, a wildlife biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, thinks the KWS estimate is optimistic. "Lions are disappearing so fast from Kenya, as well as the rest of Africa, that I think they will disappear [from Kenya] in less than 10 years if action is not taken very quickly," says Frank, who runs several lion conservation projects in the country. Read more...

Kenya's Elephants Signify Gains, Highlight Uncertainty

ENN, February 18, 2008

NAIROBI, KENYA — International bans on the ivory trade and efforts to control poaching have helped Kenya's elephant population rebound, wildlife authorities say. In the Tsavo/Mkomazi area -- a conservancy in the larger Tsavo area in southern Kenya -- the elephant population grew from 10,397 in 2005 to 11,696 in 2008, according the Kenya Wildlife Service.
The elephant population had fallen to a meager 5,000 in the 1980s, from five times that in the 1970s. Read more...