Maternal mortality causes 56,000 deaths every year in India, accounting for 20 percent of maternal deaths around the world, said John Townsend, vice president and director of the Population Council’s reproductive health program. It is a key battleground for maternal health advocates. But maternal health is sometimes eclipsed by other major health and development issues on the sub-continent. For example, nearly five times as many people suffer from HIV/AIDS and more than 400 million people live on less than $1.25 a day. [Video Below]

The original version of this article, by Cat Lazaroff, appeared on Resource Media.

What does family planning have to do with Earth Day? More than you might think. Family planning gives women and families the tools they need to decide whether and when to have children – and that, quite literally, can mean the world.

Sub-Saharan Africa is perhaps the riskiest place for a woman to give birth. According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), African women comprise approximately 56 percent of the maternal deaths and 91 percent of HIV-related maternal deaths worldwide every year. In order to bring life into this world, women in Africa literally must put their own lives on the line.

Thailand often is held up as a model of success for its efforts in family planning, but it’s amazing how quickly the country has transformed from rural and very poor to the modern economic powerhouse it is today in a matter of a few decades. Yet Dr. Kosit Panpiemras, former minister of finance and industry of Thailand, laid out the story of Thailand’s success in four succinct points. It wasn’t easy for Thailand to accomplish its goals, but the policies and investments the country made were strategic and targeted.

From the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to Superstorm Sandy, the last decade has seen an incredible array of natural disasters. Of course, disasters of all kinds are nothing new, but, thanks to the growing scale and interconnectedness of the human enterprise – and the damage we have done to the natural world – the frequency, scale, and consequences of today’s calamities are truly without precedent.

Balbine is moving through her coastal village of Andavadoaka with a sense of urgency. Normally she works as a community-based distributor for Blue Ventures’ integrated population, health, and environment (PHE) program in southwest Madagascar, providing health information and products to her community. However, since Cyclone Haruna swept through the region several weeks ago, Balbine has been especially busy distributing diarrhea treatment kits to mothers caring for sick infants, providing families sleeping out in the open with mosquito nets to protect against malaria, setting up water filtering stations, and emphasizing the importance good hygiene practices.

“We need dynamic approaches. We can’t just keep going with the single sector approach and hoping that a conservation project will do really more than it’s intended to do,” said ECSP’s Multimedia Editor Sean Peoples in an interview with Dialogue at the Wilson Center. “These people are living integrated lives. How can we have integrated solutions for them?”