Weather- and climate-related disasters have caused $2.4 trillion in economic losses and nearly 2 million deaths globally since 1971 according to a new report. While the losses are staggering, the report also shows that we have learned from past disasters, lessons the world will need as development continues in hazardous areas and the climate continues to change.

“Environmental specialists need to change,” said Anita van Breda at the Wilson Center on June 25. “In the new normal, our work has to have a different relevancy.” [Video Below]

Many existing water-sharing treaties should be re-assessed in the context of climate change, write Shlomi Dinar, David Katz, Lucia De Stefano, and Brian Blakespoor in a World Bank working paper.

In March, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest comprehensive synthesis of climate change research. The report concludes that “impacts from recent climate-related extremes, such as heat waves, droughts, floods, cyclones, and wildfires, reveal significant vulnerability and exposure of some ecosystems and many human systems to current climate variability.”

“Population is critical to thinking about sustainability and human wellbeing, and how we live and subsist on the planet,” says ECSP’s Roger-Mark De Souza on this World Population Day.

My grandmother was pleased when I told her I was heading to Ethiopia last November for an international conference focused on population, health, and the environment.

The May edition of Reproductive Health Matters is a special edition on sustainable development and reproductive health and rights. Our own Roger-Mark De Souza writes that in the quest to build resilience, development practitioners can learn from integrated population, health, and environment (PHE) programs.