Africa is unlikely to see a let up in economic woes next year mainly due to depressed commodity earnings and high energy costs, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi warned on Tuesday.

A study commissioned by Forum for Environment Ethiopia (FfE) has indicated the emergence of air pollution in Addis Ababa, mainly caused by emissions from the exhaust pipes of cars and industries.

Population Action - "Africa is under populated." Those were the shocking words of Dr. Strike Mkandla, the head of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in a provocative response to a presentation I gave on the links between population and climate change at Ethiopia's first celebration of Earth Day on April 22. Dr. Mkandla continued that Africa has lots of land that can contain many more people.

Reuters - A tree that covers a large area of eastern Ethiopia but has only recently been categorized by botanists raises hope for finding new species elsewhere, experts said.

AllAfrica - Conservation of the natural environment and taking the right decisions on the issue imperative if the country is to safeguard remaining natural heritage and leave a world worth to live in for the next generation, the Ministry of Science and Technology (MoST) said on Tuesday.

AllAfrica - The Addis Ababa Environmental Protection Authority (AAEPA) on Wednesday said even though Ethiopia has approved good policies and legislative on paper, the implementation of measures for the protection of the environment is in great difficulty.

The New York Times - The United Nations Population Division has updated its population forecasts through 2050, and concludes that, despite a longstanding global decline in fertility rates, the world is still on a path to exceed 9 billion people by mid-century, with the vast majority of the increase coming in the world’s poorest countries.

AllAfrica - Some of the most severe cases of land degradation in semi-desert areas could be reversed with the right policies, researchers in Ethiopia have concluded.

Daily Monitor — One weekly Amharic newspaper in its last week`s issue, discussed at some length, what it called "green growth" in Ethiopia. It brought into the open one long-standing dilemma: if you have two set of numbers on the same subject telling two different shades of truth, what then do you, an average citizen only intent in knowing the true status of things, do? And in the event of such a dichotomy, is the divergence between the two set of numbers because of hapless errors on the part of those who did the counting or are the flaws more systemic?