One area of concern is the Sahel, a vast semi-arid area south of the Sahara desert.
Al-Qaeda-linked fighters attacked the BP plant in the Sahara Desert on Wednesday, taking many workers hostage.
Huge swathes of the Sahel region south of the Sahara Desert have been rendered off-limits to foreigners.
Almost two years ago, I visited Burkina Faso in West Africa, just south of the Sahara desert.
Al-Qaeda's current sanctuaries whether in Pakistan's tribal frontier, remote corners of Yemen, in Somalia or the Sahara desert are certainly a worry.
The Arab Spring might find it difficult to cross the Sahara desert.
Nearly 2, 000 army personnel from Chad and Niger, with experience of fighting in the Sahara desert, are already helping consolidate the recent gains.
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As peaceful political Islam advances, al-Qaeda and its violent jihadi friends have retreated to the remotest patches of Yemen, Somalia and the Sahara desert.
The crisis started after hostage-takers attacked a gas plant at Tigantourine, near In Amenas, in the Sahara desert on Wednesday 16 January, Algerian officials said.
Besides the Argan tree's various human uses, UNESCO notes, it has had an historical role as a buffer against northern expansion of the Sahara desert.
Interestingly, rainfall patterns in the Sahel region, an arid landscape just south of the Sahara Desert where Darfur Lake is located, mirror global temperature patterns.
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Lake Chad sits on the border of the Sahel, a grassland which divides the Sahara Desert to the north and the more humid savannah to the south.
For the Tuareg and Wodaabe nomads of the Sahara desert it is a fleeting chance to enjoy the pleasures of communal living before leaving with their herds.
Along with secular Tuareg rebels they took advantage of chaos after a military coup to extend their influence to an area of the Sahara Desert larger than France.
In west Africa, the land along the southern fringe of the Sahara desert is particularly fragile, and every year the growing population puts more pressure on the environment.
The best is in the Sahara desert, particularly in Niger's Air mountains, in the Tibesti mountains of northern Chad and southern Libya, and in south-east Algeria's Tassili n'Ajjer range.
Between 80 and 100 storm systems form each year as bodies of hot, dry air over the Sahara Desert, pick up moisture as they move out across the Atlantic.
In other news, renewable energy is heating up around the globe as the EU recently announced that it will import solar energy from the Sahara Desert within 5 years.
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Based a few kilometers outside the historic town of Timbuktu, on the fringes of the Sahara Desert, the festival is inspired by the traditional gatherings of the region's Tuareg nomads.
The Tuaregs have traditionally been a nomadic people roaming across the Sahara Desert but some took up arms, saying the Niger government is not doing enough to improve their lives.
Twenty years later, Austrian astronomer Joseph von Littrow expanded on that idea, suggesting the excavation of huge trenches in the Sahara desert, which would be filled with kerosene and set ablaze.
But recent fighting in the Sahel the arid region just south of the Sahara Desert has sent jihadi fighters looking for new havens, raising fears that Tunisia is in their sights.
McRae filled in his time with appearances on the Dakar Rally across the Sahara Desert, and at the Le Mans 24-Hour Race, as well as intermittent one-off returns to the world rally championship.
His rowing companion Mr Humphreys, 32, from Clapham, London, previously spent four years cycling round the world, has written two books and run the Marathon des Sables, a six-day endurance race across the Sahara desert.
Foreign governments, which supported Mr Abdallahi's government as a bulwark of stability against the perceived threat of Islamist extremists in the Sahel, the swathe of Africa just to the south of the Sahara desert, reacted angrily.
The Algerian Interior Ministry also said that 107 foreign workers and 685 local employees had been released, following the end of the hostage-taking by Islamist militants at the Western-run In Amenas gas facility, in the Sahara desert.
Some of the tribes there have a history of hostility to the colonel, while the rugged Tuareg people who populate a swathe of the Sahara desert from Libya to Mali, and were long favoured by the Libyan leader with jobs and guns, seem to be abandoning him.
This week at Inhabitat, we were thankful to be able to witness the long-awaited unveiling of the futuristic solar-powered Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi, and we also heard the exciting news that scientists are developing a project that could have us using the Sahara desert to supply 50% of the world's energy by 2050.
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