It’s been 14 years since the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1325 acknowledging women as important agents of change in recovery from conflict and peacebuilding generally. But between 1992 and 2011, only four percent of signatories in 31 major peace processes around the world were women, and only 12 out of 585 peace agreements referred to or made provisions for women’s needs in the reconstruction process.

To stop and perhaps one day reverse climate change requires changes big and small. Despite the thousands of power plants burning coal and other fossil fuels today, nearly 3 billion people still depend on solid fuels, such as wood, dung, and crop residues, for their daily energy needs.

In an effort to revamp the time-intensive process of conducting household surveys to collect health data in developing countries, a new project is using mobile phones and rapid processing techniques to generate regular updates for a tranche of indicators previously only adjusted every three to five years.

Despite some critics, the recent U.S.-China agreement over carbon emissions has sparked remarkable optimism in global climate negotiations. It’s also opened the door to new bilateral engagement between the U.S. and Chinese environmental communities on other issues, including China’s massive air pollution problems (16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities are in China).

“A world in which a quarter of humanity is denied full enjoyment of their rights is an unjust world,” said Kate Gilmore, deputy executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). “It’s a world without the building blocks for human progress, for human peace, for human security.” [Video Below]

Climate change and conflict – what’s the relationship? In a recently completed set of field-based studies for USAID, the Foundation for Environmental Security and Sustainability set aside “yes-or-no” questions about whether climate change causes conflict and replaced them with pragmatic and politically informed questions about how climate change is consequential for conflict in specific fragile states.

Until two years ago, when the National Wildlife Federation pointed out their presence, the 61-year-old steel oil pipelines running beneath the fast-flowing Mackinac Straits between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron were like nearly every other piece of North America’s energy transport network: out of sight and out of mind.