Gifted with huge reserves of oil and gas, Nigeria is today one of the fastest growing economies in the world. But despite its natural wealth, the country is struggling to provide basic energy for its own citizens, two-thirds of whom currently live on less than a dollar a day.
In this story, a non-profit makes the case that, sometimes, a more “modern” fuel can play an important role in helping meet a country’s specific energy development goals.
So you think you can’t reduce energy poverty, cut greenhouse gas emissions, create jobs, and turn a profit at the same time in one of the world’s poorest countries?
Conor Fox thinks otherwise.
(BBC) More than 300 people are feared dead after heavy rain caused a series of landslides in the mountainous eastern region of Bududa in Uganda. A trading centre in a village was flattened, leaving shops and houses buried under the mud, officials said. Rescuers are digging in the mud with hand-held tools as mechanical diggers cannot reach the affected villages. President Yoweri Museveni visited the affected area, and criticised residents for settling on a floodplain. The president also said the disaster could be partially blamed on local farmers for stripping the land of thick plant life. Some 86 deaths have been confirmed, with local officials saying at least 250 people remain missing.
In October 1998 I walked out of a Costa Rican jungle after narrowly escaping a disastrous film shoot with crocodiles.
The near fiasco had nothing to do with filming the animals up close in their natural habitat. Instead, what almost sunk the project was the relentless pounding of a tropical rain that soaked everything and everyone.
Back in our hotel in San Jose we discovered the cause of the rain was a major hurricane that had slowly swept across the Central American isthmus, causing massive death and destruction in Guatemala, Honduras, and in my home country, Nicaragua. Nearly 11,000 people were killed. The flooding caused extreme damage, estimated at over $5 billion (1998 USD, $6.5 billion 2008 USD).