Sierra Leone

By Dr. Kolleh A Bangura

To assist Sierra Leone protected areas in building their resilience to climate change, the PARCC (Protected Areas Resilience to Climate Change) project has assessed future climate impacts of land use change on ecosystem services in Sierra Leone. This includes applying five spatially detailed regional climate model projections developed for the project and scenarios of future land use change.

This article summarizes the main features of projected climate impacts on ecosystem services and their implications for focus project areas in Sierra Leone and future national planning. Findings from the latest annual assessment report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are referred to in order to provide guidance on the way to interpret these results.

Climate Projections

The projections for mean annual temperature in Sierra Leone for the end of the 21st century are for significant increases (with very high confidence):

By Finbarr O'Reilly May. 2, 2016

When she went into labor last November, 18-year-old Kema James climbed onto the back of a motorbike taxi in her village in eastern Sierra Leone and rode half an hour to the main government hospital in the nearby city of Kenema.

When her baby was delivered, he was sickly yellow and stricken with sepsis, an ailment caused by bacteria in the blood, and he hung limply in the hands of the hospital staff. He died five days later before he could be named.

Source: World Health Organization - Credit: Michaeleen Doucleff and Alyson Hurt/NPR

CLICK HERE - RESEARCH - Reduced evolutionary rate in reemerged Ebola virus transmission chains

The West African countries at the center of the epidemic have had flareups even after being declared Ebola-free by the World Health Organization.

npr.org - by Michaeleen Doucleff - April 29, 2016

Just when health officials think the Ebola outbreak is over in West Africa, the virus pops up again seemingly out of the blue. It's happened at least five times so far.

Now scientists are starting to figure out why: The virus can lay dormant in a survivor for more than year and then re-emerge to infect others.

Liberia’s launch of two new vaccines and the planned rally by main opposition Congress for Democratic Change, on Thursday dominate the headlines in the Thursday, April 28 editions of Liberian newspapers.The Congress for Democratic Change of former World Soccer Best player George Weah is Thursday holding a rally to petition its standard bearer, George Weah to contest the 2017 presidential race.

During a meeting the party held with the Liberia National Police, the police advised it (CDC) which has large support in the capital Monrovia to transport its members in vehicles to its headquarters to avoid traffic jams and obstruction of free movement.

Among other things, the police also advised the CDC to assign its party members to assist with crown control.

The New Dawn newspaper published this story as its front page banner headline under the caption: “Will it hold?-Police Order CDC to truck supporters, while the Daily Observer and Inquirer newspapers carried this story on their front pages.

The Daily Observer has the headline: For Today’s March, CDC, Police Prepare, while the Inquirer has the title: “Police, CDC Agree On Traffic.”