A wildlife official says that about 5,000 elephants have been killed by poachers over the past five years around the Nouabale Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo.

Thomas Breuer, a senior technical official of the Wildlife Conservation Society project in the park, says that authorities must take action and double guards around the park.

Breuer says that while poaching around the park is intensifying, poaching inside is not as prevalent.

Study claims more than half of them died in the first 28 days of their life

More than 16.8 lakh children under five years died of infectious, but preventable, diseases in India in 2010 and more than half of them could not complete the first month of their life, a new study has claimed. Of the total deaths, 52 per cent, or about 0.875 million, were among the children who died in the first 28 days of their life, according to the study published in The Lancet on Thursday.

Ahead of the World Bank's Spring Meetings here this week, government ministers from almost 40 developing countries are meeting with UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake, UK International Development Secretary of State Andrew Mitchell, Chair of the United Nations Secretary General's Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation HRH the Prince of Orange, and major donors and water and sanitation sector organizations, to discuss speeding up global access to water and sanitation.

Huge reserves of underground water in some of the driest parts of Africa could provide a buffer against the effects of climate change for years to come, scientists said on Friday.

Researchers from the British Geological Survey and University College London have for the first time mapped the aquifers, or groundwater, across the continent and the amount they hold.

"The largest groundwater volumes are found in the large sedimentary aquifers in the North African countries Libya, Algeria, Egypt and Sudan," the scientists said in their paper.

Tropical forests in Africa may be more resilient to future climate change than the Amazon and other regions, a gathering of scientists has said. An international conference agreed that the region’s surviving tree species had endured a number of climatic catastrophes over the past 4,000 years.

As a result, they are better suited to cope with future shifts in the climate.

The event at the University of Oxford looked at the “fate of Africa’s tropical forests in the 21st century”.

British oil firm Soco International said on Thursday it has been given permission to carry out aerial surveys of a Congolese oil block where exploration was suspended last year due to concerns over environmental damage.

Soco has rights to Block 5 but exploration has been halted as the block sits partially in Democratic Republic of Congo's Virunga National Park, which is Africa's oldest and home to some of the world's last remaining mountain gorillas.

The Nouabale-Ndoki National Park is a lush rainforest park within the equatorial nation of the Republic of Congo (ROC), not to be confused with the much larger Democratic Republic of Congo to the south and east. The ROC has followed through on its commitments to expand the park by 8 percent, from about 1,500 square miles to about 1,630 square miles. The newly included area holds a unique ecosystem known as the Goualougo Triangle.

Low-cost solar panels and solar batteries will be provided to poor communities in 14 countries in Africa and Asia in the next four years, the UN Development Programme said Thursday.

A total of 33 million people in the 14 countries will be able to make use of solar energy for commercial businesses and economic development, using the solar panels to be developed by a Mauritius-based company called ToughStuff, UNDP said.

Cholera cases have soared in the Democratic Republic of Congo in recent weeks, the UN said on Friday, bringing the number of people infected in the year-long outbreak to 22,000 with 584 deaths.

Aid agencies have been trying to halt the spread of the water-borne disease that has ravaged eight of the country's 11 provinces since January 2011.

"There has been a spike in cases" since mid-December, with figures on the rise in the capital Kinshasa in particular, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said.