While it can be convenient to think of human health and the environment as unrelated silos, they are in fact closely related. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) recently released a report underscoring this point especially for Africa, where large numbers of people are directly reliant on natural resources for their livelihoods.

We need to understand why barriers to trade exist in order to alleviate the food insecurity that confronts Africa, said Makhtar Diop, World Bank vice president for Africa, at the Wilson Center in January.

The World Bank released a new report in October 2012 that is part of a series that concentrates on intraregional trade. Africa Can Help Feed Africa: Removing Regional Barriers to Trade in Food Staples, however, is unique, Diop said, because it “moves the focus from general barriers to trade in Africa to focus on food,” so that policymakers can move away from crisis response and address food insecurity at a base level. [Video Below]

When Superstorm Sandy slammed into the U.S. East Coast last October, it was the latest in a series of “teachable moments” about our growing vulnerability to climate change.

The conversation around immigration and Mexico has long been tied to the United States and the prevailing economic conditions in both countries. But a new report from the Royal United Services Institute argues that as temperatures rise and precipitation patterns change over the course of the next century, climate too will increasingly become a driver of both internal and international migration in Mexico. [Video Below]

“We chose the Philippines because we really wanted to do a story that looked at population growth,” reporter Sam Eaton says of his two-part contribution to the Food for Nine Billion project, which aired last year on PBS’ NewsHour and American Public Media’s Marketplace. Eaton recently visited the Wilson Center to discuss his experiences in the Philippines, describing the heavy toll overcrowding and poor resource management is taking on the country’s ecosystems and highlighting how access to family planning may hold the key to a better future.

“My income is just right to feed us three times a day,” Jason Bostero told Sam Eaton in the rural Philippine village of Humayhumay. “It’s really, really different when you have a small family.” Eaton traveled to the Philippines to report on the connections between food security and population for Homelands Productions, creating a short film and radio piece that ran on NewsHour and Marketplace as part the Food for Nine Billion series last year. [Video Below]

2012 witnessed a remarkable number and extremity of environmental conditions, from Hurricane Sandy and the U.S. drought to wildfires in Siberia and drought-driven blackouts in India. Arctic sea ice melted to its furthest extent in recent history. The energy landscape continued to change as well, from the launch of the U.S. Navy’s Great Green Fleet to the first liquefied natural gas shipments across the Arctic. As President Obama clearly stated in his second inaugural address, climate change is heightening both our risks and the need to respond, but tying together all of these issues is a highly complex endeavor.