Wars keep children out of school. So does sickness. But in Niger, a sun-baked land where drought occurs with alarming frequency, a major impediment to education is thirst and the long trek required to quench it.

The school day had already begun on a recent morning as a procession of small children on donkeys, school-age all, made their way over a sandy field, joining other youths gathered with their animals around deep holes in the ground.

Famine is over in war-torn Somalia but the problems are not: Haweyo Ibrahim survives on meagre food aid handouts rather than return to her village, controlled by Shebab rebels who killed her husband.

‘Until the Shebab leave, I cannot go back,’ 40-year old Ibrahim said, queuing for food aid handouts in the anarchic Somali capital Mogadishu.

‘I cannot go back to where they murdered my husband,’ she added quietly.

The United Nations said on Friday that the famine that has killed tens of thousands of people in Somalia this past year has ended, thanks to a bumper harvest and a surge in emergency food deliveries.

But conditions are still precarious, United Nations officials warned, with many Somalis dying of hunger and more than two million still needing emergency rations to survive.

“The crisis is not over,” said José Graziano da Silva, director general of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, who just returned from Somalia.

An exceptional harvest after good rains and food deliveries by aid agencies have ended famine in Somalia although conditions remain fragile and could worsen, the United Nations said on Friday.

The U.N. declared famine in two parts of southern Somalia last July and extended the famine warning in September to six out of eight regions in the anarchic Horn of Africa country.

Depletion of bamboo clusters in Kerala’s Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary is threatening to make the coming summer hard for several species of wildlife there and in the adjoining forests that constitute the Nilgiris biosphere. Experts say that the phenomenon could even lead to a famine as far as Wayanad jungles’ herbivores are concerned.

The drought-induced famine crisis in Somalia has eased somewhat, United Nations officials said on Friday, with the number of people facing imminent starvation dropping to nearly 250,000 from 750,000 because of rainfall and increased aid deliveries.

The world's population of seven billion is set to rise to at least 10 billion by 2100, but could top 15 billion if birth rates are just slightly higher than expected, the United Nations said on Wednesday.

In a report ahead of ceremonies on October 31 to mark the seven billionth human alive today, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) warned demographic pressure posed mighty challenges for easing poverty and conserving the environment.

Under pressure: millions of people are moving to places that are more vulnerable to environmental disaster, including the Dharavi slum in Mumbai

Tens of millions of people are moving to places that are more vulnerable to environmental disaster, particularly the urban flood plains of Asia and Africa, according to a UK government report.