A record surge of solar panels flowing from China to countries in Africa over the past year is a sign the continent is seeing a rapid build-out of renewable energy. That could help expand access to cheap, clean electricity and reduce reliance on imported fossil fuels.

“This isn’t a massive explosion yet in itself,” says at Ember, an energy think tank in the UK. “It’s the start of the takeoff.”

Jones and his colleagues analysed on Chinese solar panel exports since 2017. There is some solar panel manufacturing capacity in Africa – but as with most of the world, Chinese imports make up nearly all of the continent’s supply.

Between June 2024 and 2025, the researchers found exports to Africa surged 60 per cent compared to the previous year, amounting to just over 15 gigawatts of power capacity imported over that period.

Unlike an earlier surge in 2022 and 2023 that was driven mostly by imports to South Africa, this upward trend was spread across the continent – with 20 countries seeing import records and 25 countries importing more than 100 megawatts worth of panels. “It’s not being led by one or two countries,” says Jones. “To me, that’s the most incredible part of the story.”

South Africa was still the leader, importing about a quarter of the total. But other countries also imported a raft of panels: Nigeria was second with 1721 megawatts, followed by Algeria with 1199 megawatts, about a tenth of the total. Over the past two years, solar panel imports from China to countries in Africa – excluding South Africa –have more than tripled.

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Assuming all the panels imported over the past year were installed, the researchers estimate 16 countries imported enough to supply at least 5 per cent of current electricity generation; Sierra Leone could generate more than 60 per cent of its current electricity with the panels it imported alone. These solar imports could begin to offset far more expensive fossil fuel imports.

“Africa’s just energy transition is no longer a future aspiration. It is unfolding now,” says at Greenpeace Africa, an environmental advocacy group. “This transition has a huge potential of reshaping how we build resilience to the climate chaos and drive development.”

The surge comes partly from large solar installations under construction, but that isn’t the whole story. Jones says a lot of the imports appear to be going to small, distributed installations on rooftops or farms, as people seek cheaper, more reliable sources than national grids. A similar trend is playing out in Pakistan, which saw explosive growth in rooftop solar over the past few years driven by the falling cost of panels.

This is a hopeful trend, given about in Africa – nearly half of the continent’s population – lack access to reliable electricity. However, solar development on the continent still lags behind the rest of the world. African countries have struggled to attract investment in renewable energy, receiving just of the global total in recent decades, according to the International Energy Agency. Over the past year, Pakistan alone saw more solar panel imports than all of Africa, despite having one-sixth the population.

“The real challenge before us is to turn this momentum into lasting gains by aligning financing, policy and local industries to ensure clean energy is not only available, but also reliable, affordable and inclusive for all Africans,” says Wemanya.

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More than a third of the great apes living in Africa are under threat from the booming demand for minerals that are critical to the creation of green energy technologies, such as electric vehicles.

Africa is home to around one sixth of the world’s remaining forests, with the habitat found in countries such as Ghana, Gabon and Uganda. The continent also houses four great ape species: chimpanzees, bonobos and two species of gorilla.

But many of these great apes live in regions eyed by mining firms as potential sites to extract commodities. For instance, , and 22 per cent of its graphite.

To assess the scale of the threat to great ape populations, , formerly at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research and now at the non-profit conservation group Re:wild in Austin, Texas, and her colleagues overlaid the location of operational and planned mining sites across 17 African countries with available data on the density and distribution of ape populations. ��

The team drew a 50 kilometre “buffer zone” around mining sites, to account both for their direct impacts on ape populations, such as noise pollution, habitat loss and disease spillover, as well as indirect disturbances, such as the construction of new service roads and infrastructure.��

In total, 180,000 great apes – just over one-third of the entire continental population – could be threatened by mining activities, the researchers found.��

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The West African countries Liberia, Sierra Leone, Mali and Guinea saw the largest overlap between ape populations and mining sites. In Guinea, 83 per cent of the ape population could be affected by mining, the study finds. ��

The team only considered industrial mining projects, says Junker. The threat could be even larger once the impact of artisanal mines, where miners usually work in rudimentary and often hazardous conditions, is considered.��

Cobalt, manganese and graphite are all used in the manufacture of lithium-ion batteries, which power electric vehicles. Other materials found in these countries, including bauxite, platinum, copper, graphite and lithium, are used to power green technologies, such as hydrogen, wind turbines and solar panels.

Junker says companies should stop mining in areas important for apes and instead focus on recycling these critical materials from waste. “There’s huge potential in reusing metals,” she says. “We simply need to consume more sustainably. Then it will be possible to leave at least some of the areas intact that are very important for great apes.” ��

She also calls for mining companies to make public biodiversity assessments of potential mining sites. “Greater transparency is the first step.”��

Primates living in Uganda have 97 chemical pollutants in their digestive tract, some of which are linked to hormonal changes in females and young primates.

Chemical pollutants have reached every corner of our planet, making exposure to these often-harmful substances in air, food and water all but unavoidable for both humans and wildlife. To find out how these are impacting wild primates, researchers used a minimally invasive sampling method: collecting droppings.

Over two months in 2017, at Indiana University and her colleagues collected a total of 71 faecal samples from chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), olive baboons (Papio anubis), red colobus (Piliocolobus tephrosceles) and red-tailed monkeys (Cercopithecus ascanius) in Uganda’s Kibale National Park.

The researchers tested the faeces using chemical analyses and found 97 pollutants, most of which are known to disrupt how hormones function in mammals. Pesticides and flame retardants, both present in the samples, are examples of such pollutants.

The team also tested hormone levels. Across all species, females that had a higher concentration of pesticides in their faeces were more likely to have higher levels of cortisol – a stress hormone that helps regulate metabolism and the immune system. The researchers found a similar pattern in young primates, where greater concentrations of flame retardants in faeces were associated with higher cortisol and decreased levels of the reproductive hormone oestradiol.

“Our results showing effects in juveniles are especially concerning,” says Steiniche, because early exposure to these chemicals during development can have life-long effects. She says the team will need to monitor the primates over the long term to see how these toxins impact their growth and reproduction.

This is a wake-up call to those that view national parks as places free from human influence.��“I think we still tend to have an idealised image of wild primates living in beautiful, undisturbed habitats, but the unfortunate reality is that even protected areas are not buffered from the impacts of pollution,” says Steiniche.

A deadly fungus that feeds on the skin of frogs and other amphibians has been rapidly spreading under the radar in Africa. Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis – Bd for short – has surged on the continent in the last two decades, raising concerns it could decimate amphibian populations in Africa as it has elsewhere in the world.

Bd causes a disease called chytridiomycosis, which leads to heart failure in amphibians and has been blamed for dramatic population collapses in the Americas and Australia. “We’re talking about hundreds of species that have been driven to or near extinction by one single pathogen,” says at San Francisco State University.

Researchers think Bd originated in Asia, reaching every continent except Antarctica by the late 1900s. Yet its impact in Africa has remained relatively unexplored. Previous research suggests it has been on the continent since the 1930s, albeit at low levels. Some studies hint at higher infection rates more recently, but that could just be an artefact of researchers looking for Bd more now than in the past.

To learn more, Vredenburg and his colleagues turned to museum collections of amphibians. Fungi and other parasites often get preserved along with the animals they inhabit, which allows researchers to use museum specimens for studying the history of infectious diseases.

The team took skin swabs from nearly 3000 specimens collected in Africa over the past century. They also tested the skin of 1651 live amphibians found in the wild, and gathered thousands of additional records from other studies of specimens collected between 1852 and 2017.

Combining all this information, they found that Bd kept a low profile in Africa during the 1900s, consistently appearing in less than 5 per cent of animals tested. But that changed at the turn of the century, with prevalence soaring to around 20 percent across the continent in the early 2000s.

It isn’t clear what caused the increase, but one possible explanation is that trade and the associated movement of people and cargo spread Bd into new areas –as happened previously in other parts of the world, says Vredenburg.

The team has collected “an impressive amount of new data” to complement existing research, says at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. She says that many of the regions that show increases in Bd have also experienced declines in their amphibian populations – something the researchers suggest is no coincidence.

In Cameroon, for example, where the team’s data showed Bd prevalence hitting nearly 40 percent in the 2010s, numbers of once-common amphibians such as puddle frogs and long-fingered frogs have been falling rapidly.

The researchers also used the trends they found, along with existing data on Bd’s preferred climate and hosts, to predict where the fungus might go next. Parts of western Africa that have so far had no reports of chytridiomycosis could be particularly at risk, they showed.

at the US Forest Service says she is pleased to see this kind of risk assessment applied to Bd in Africa. “These are tools that managers can use to identify the most important areas that might be needed for conservation planning… to prevent any further catastrophes for vulnerable species.”

Vredenburg says he hopes the findings will encourage more research on Africa’s amphibians. These animals are “highly understudied”, he says. “There’s probably a lot we could do [to help them] if we had more information.”