Global alliance aims to tackle forest crime

Illegal logging damages biodiversity and undermines people's livelihoods.

Interpol and the United Nations have joined forces to launch an initiative to tackle global forest crime.

At the Planet Under Pressure conference in London, Diana Liverman and Will Steffen present something of a contrasting couple.

The two professors have been working together on a State of the Planet report, which has involved trawling through numerous reports and scientific papers. At the end of it all, the message of one appears somewhat optimistic, the other fundamentally pessimistic. They agree that changes to the world since about 1950 have been startling - rapid spread of the human population, accelerating exploitation of forests and marine resources, surging economic growth in successive waves across the world, and so on. This radical reshaping of the natural world by a single species is certainly unprecedented in Earth history, which a few years back led to scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer coining a special name for our epoch - the Anthropocene.

Rangers in the Democratic Republic of Congo's Virunga park have a new weapon in their fight against poachers. National Park authorities have trained five bloodhound dogs to track elephant poachers after a spate of incidents. The first investigation using the dogs was carried out last week and led to the discovery of illegal weapons. Poaching is one of the key threats to the animals in Virunga, a Unesco World Heritage Site in the war-torn eastern region of DR Congo. The park is also home to gorillas, chimpanzees, okapi, forest elephants and buffalo, among other wildlife. Some 300 rangers protect the park from poachers, rebel groups and illegal miners. 'Effective weapon' Park authorities now hope the bloodhound programme, which was implemented with help from a specialised Swiss centre and volunteers from the German police, will help to protect the vulnerable elephant population from ivory poachers. The dogs and their handlers got the chance to put their training into action on 1 March, when rangers spotted a dead elephant with its tusks cut off on the edge of Virunga.

South Africa troops tackle rhino poachers

Justice Minister Jeff Radebe said four military companies would be sent to the borders with Zimbabwe, Swaziland and Lesotho. Syndicates export the horns from Africa to parts of Asia and the Middle East. In 2011, a record 450 rhinos were killed by poachers in South Africa, the Department of Environment Affairs says. Mr Radebe said about 600 soldiers would join the fight against rhino poaching. "The deployment includes army engineers who are conducting repairs and maintenance on the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border fence, which is approximately 140 kilometres (85 miles)," Mr Radebe said. Last year troops were deployed along the Mozambican border, many of them inside the world-famous Kruger National Park where more than 200 rhinos were killed last year.