At the recent UN Climate Summit in New York 27 countries 34 major companies, and 61 NGOs signed the New York Declaration on Forests. They vowed to halve deforestation by 2020, and end it by 2030. Signatories included some countries with high rates of deforestation.

Despite the civil war in the Central African Republic has now a religious character, its origin lies in decades of political instability. They have accentuated sectarian sensibilities which revolve around distribution of dwindling resources. At the core, the civil war is an end of a long progression which started by a complex interaction of factors, in particular deteriorating grazing lands and water resources, aggravated by bad governance as well as porous borders over the years.