NEW DELHI, India – There are nearly 1.3 billion people in this swarming democracy, where over 66 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in the general election last May. A few of them took me aside this week to express surprise at the puzzle that is the American electorate and its national leadership.

There are now well over 16 million refugees worldwide and 65 million people internally displaced by conflict and disasters, according to recent estimates. As more and more people are uprooted from their homes, mounting environmental pressures threaten to reinforce cycles of poverty and displacement if left unaddressed, says Alice Thomas in this week’s podcast.

Reporting on long-term, complex human-environment interactions can be daunting. As the saying goes, “if it bleeds, it leads,” and slow, sometimes-distant changes rarely make headlines. Yet, earlier this year CNN International’s African Voices program took a stab at it, diving into the world of integrated development in a three-part profile of Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), a Ugandan NGO that is working to preserve one of Central Africa’s most important biodiversity hotspots while strengthening the health and wellbeing of nearby communities.

In sub-Saharan Africa, women collectively spend an estimated 40 billion hours a year gathering water, often walking miles to the nearest source, which may not be clean, and braving exhaustion, harassment, and worse along the way. Water availability and quality at health clinics is often not much better, creating a crisis for women, especially pregnant women, throughout the continent. A mutual solution lies in better coordination between efforts to improve water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) and maternal health, says the African Medical and Research Foundation’s Lisa Meadowcroft in this week’s podcast.