Delegates from 140 countries, 80 of them at ministerial level, attended the 26th session of the governing council of the United Nations Environment Programme, headquartered in Nairobi.

The delegates will discuss beefing up international environmental management tools, deemed to be insufficient given the scale of the problems facing the planet.

"Notwithstanding the impressive landscape of institutions, agreements and protocols, the environmental governance landscape of the here and now is increasingly fractured and fragmented," UNEP chief Achim Steiner told the meeting.

"I am sure previous generations of environment ministers never intended this."

Any consensus on the reforms actually looks to be a long way off, despite several years of debate and even as the next UN sustainable development conference, planned for Rio de Janeiro in June 2012, looms closer.

"We need to be unaninous in saying we need a stronger and more coherent framework for world environment governance," said Henri Djombo, environment minister of the Republic of Congo (DRC) and acting chairman of the UNEP governing council.

The international community remains divided over whether it is better to reinforce existing institution, starting with UNEP, or whether a new international body should be set up.

earlier related report
Nigerian unearth weapons cache in house raid
Kano, Nigeria (AFP) Feb 21, 2011 - Police said Monday they killed five suspected Islamists and uncovered weapons stashed away in a house in a northern Nigerian region hit by series of attacks blamed on a radical sect.

The raid in which weapons including rocket-propelled grenades, firearms and rocket launchers were found, occurred on Sunday in northeastern Nigeria, where an Islamist sect known as Boko Haram is active. The raid in Yobe State came a day after another cache was separately discovered in a car in neighbouring Borno.

"We succeeded in killing five of them (sect members) at their hideout in Damaturu and arrested three others who confessed they belong to Boko Haram sect," Mohammed Jinjiri Abubakar, police commissioner for Borno State where the sect is based, told AFP.

Several rifles, 12 rocket launchers, two rocket propelled grenade bombs, bomb denotating cables and more than 3,000 ammunitions were among the weapons found in a house in Damaturu, the capital of Yobe.

"This is a very important discovery in the fight against Boko Haram militants that have been terrorising these parts of the country," said Abubakar.

Police staged the raid after one gunman survived in a shootout with the military in the border town of Gamboru Ngala near the border with Cameroon on Saturday and led the security forces to the house in Damaturu.

The military had on Sunday said all three gunmen it confronted had been killed, but police said one survived.

The Boko Haram sect launched an uprising in 2009 put down by a brutal military assault that left hundreds dead.

It has been blamed for a series of attacks and hit-and-run shootings in northern Nigeria in recent months that have left dozens dead.

Police say some of the killings may have been politically related ahead of April elections.

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