According to the UN, the planet has warmed faster since the turn of the century than any other period on record. Sea-level rise has also increased pace to 0.12 inches a year – almost double the rate observed during the 20^th century. This “unprecedented” rate of climate change is expected to disproportionally impact developing countries, whose socio-economic, political, and physical landscapes make them particularly vulnerable to the effects. The GAIN Index, an interactive mapping tool recently acquired by the University of Notre Dame, can help policymakers prepare for these changes by comparing the climate change vulnerability and readiness of countries around the world.

The original version of this article, by Natalia Machuca, appeared on USAID’s Impact blog.

A newly released nationwide health survey of Haiti shows continuing positive trends on key health-care indicators in particular those of Haitian women and children. The latest survey, undertaken by the Haitian Ministry of Public Health and Population, was conducted in 2012 and compares with the prior survey done in 2006. It shows steady improvements among key indicators despite significant health challenges in Haiti due to the 2010 earthquake and cholera outbreak. Of note were improved indicators for child vaccination and malnutrition, infant and child mortality, women’s health, and contraception use. The report indicated no increase in HIV prevalence, which remained steady.

Fire needs oxygen to burn. When a fire starts inside a building, the floors, ceilings, walls, doors, and windows can constrict the flow of air. Breaking in to fight the fire thus carries the risk of opening a new airway. If that happens, a smoldering fire can expand explosively, bursting into roaring flames as it sucks air in through the new passageway. This sudden inrush of air to fuel a burst of fire has a name: backdraft.

The original version of this article, by Margarita Mora, appeared on Conservation International’s Human Nature blog.

I first visited Peru’s Alto Mayo Protected Forest in 2008. At the time, deforestation rates there were among the highest in the country. CI-Peru wanted to find a way to help communities and Peru’s National Service of Natural Protected Areas (SERNANP) keep their trees standing.

“The places in the world where the environment is most fragile, women’s health is most fragile,” said Leila Darabi, director of global communications for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, at the Wilson Center. “The negative impacts on the environment tend to affect women the most. Women are the people who are planting kitchen gardens, women are traditional healers, and so they often feel the impact first when those things are degraded.”

The original version of this article, by Mike Ives, appeared on Yale Environment 360.

Phan Dinh Duc leans against yellow sacks of freshly harvested rice. It’s a warm spring evening in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, and Duc, a local farmer, is waiting for traders to arrive by truck to purchase his produce and sell it on commodities markets. Beyond him lies a vast checkerboard of rice paddies, each filled with water and bordered by a network of canals and roughly 10-foot-high earthen dikes. They enable year-round rice cultivation in an area where, a half century ago, vast floodplains typically lay fallow for half the year and farmers planted one annual rice crop that grew in tandem with seasonal floods.

China’s economic boom appears to be contagious. Over the past few years, China’s northern neighbor has quietly caught the bug and become the world’s second-fastest growing economy, experiencing a GDP growth rate of approximately 17.3 percent in 2011.