Quantifying the role population plays in food security is “an incredibly powerful piece of information,” said Kathleen Mogelgaard in an interview with ECSP. Malawi is a case in point.

Mogelgaard saw the connections between food, population, and climate change firsthand on a recent trip to the southeast African country, whose population of 15 million is largely dependent on subsistence, rain-fed agriculture. “One in five children in Malawi is currently undernourished,” Mogelgaard said, and climate change paints a bleak picture for the future.

Tanzania’s Saadani National Park is a hotbed of biodiversity and, like other national parks in the region, it’s surrounded by human activity. A report by the BALANCED Project, “Population, Health, Environment Situational Analysis for the Saadani National Park Area, Tanzania,” provides a snapshot of the population, health, and environment situation inside the park to serve as a baseline for future activities of the Tanzania Coastal Management Partnership (TCMP) – a joint initiative of the government of Tanzania, USAID, and the University of Rhode Island’s Coastal Resources Center. A behavioral monitoring system implemented in June 2009 used surveys that reached a total of 437 respondents (54 percent women) from eight villages to analyze the “behaviors that positively and negatively influence the utilization and condition of natural resources.”  The surveys found that arable land is scarce, fisheries are being depleted, and people have inadequate access to healthcare, water, sanitation, fuel, and family planning resources. The results suggest a strong case for expanding TCMP’s existing integrated approach – combining HIV/AIDS, conservation, and livelihoods goals – to include promotion of positive behavior changes, particularly as they relate to family planning and the effects of population growth on biodiversity loss and resource depletion.

In 2011, a record 34 billion cubic tons of carbon dioxide were emitted from man-made sources. Half the emitted CO₂ stays in the atmosphere, about a quarter is absorbed on land (as trees grow, for example), and the remainder is absorbed by the ocean. Unsurprisingly, this incredible amount of carbon dioxide significantly changes the ocean environment. Over time, increased absorption of carbon dioxide in the oceans has led to ocean acidification, and overall warming has also led to warming of ocean waters – both changes impact marine ecosystems and the people who rely on them.

Today is the first “International Day of the Girl Child” – a day established last year by the United Nations to acknowledge the rights and unique challenges faced by young girls around the world.

The latest UN projections put the number of women under the age of 19 at about 1.18 billion today. Especially in developing countries (though not only) these young girls often face outsized barriers to happy, healthy, and productive lives.

The water-energy-food nexus seems to be garnering more and more attention in the media and elsewhere, and it’s easy to see why: it’s a relatively simple way to illustrate how interconnected the world is today and the kind of domino-like effects that scarcity can have.

On April 1, 2012, a Chinese woman on her way to work suddenly felt the earth beneath her crumble and, in an instant, found herself plunging into an abyss of scalding hot water. The woman had unknowingly stepped into one of the many sinkholes appearing in China’s megacities. The emergence of sinkholes in China is part of a larger set of environmental issues related to rapid urbanization taking place in the Asia-Pacific region overall. [Video Below]

Earlier this month, there was a flurry of stories about brutal mass killings in clashes between the Pokomo and Orma communities over water and land in southeast Kenya’s Tana River County. The Kenyan media reported that about 30 people, including eight security personnel, had been killed and scores wounded, and reports on the death toll since last month are more than 100.

“Over the past several months, extreme weather and climate events seemed to have become the norm rather than the exception,” writes Kelly Levin for the World Resources Institute (WRI). Indeed, records have been broken around the world as countries experience unprecedented heat, drought, flooding, or other types of severe weather. And people are starting to take notice. A number of recent stories try to make sense of this wild weather and what, if anything, it has to do with climate change.