The original version of this article, by Rachel Yavinsky, appeared on the Population Reference Bureau’s Behind the Numbers blog.

After 45 minutes on Lake Victoria in a wooden fishing boat, my PRB colleague and I arrived on Busi Island, one of the Ugandan sites of the HOPE-LVB (Health of People and the Environment – Lake Victoria Basin) project. PRB, who partners on this project, came to Busi Island to see HOPE-LVB in action.

A majority of the world population now lives in urban settings, but many of the most rapidly growing cities are unprepared to accommodate their new citizens. Newly swollen municipalities in poor and institutionally fragile countries are especially disadvantaged by poor planning and management, deficient public services, and citizen insecurity.

The Wilson Center Policy Briefs are a series of short analyses of critical global issues facing the next administration that will run until inauguration day.

Seven billion people now live on Earth, only a dozen years after the global population hit six billion. But this milestone is not about sheer numbers. Demographic trends will significantly affect the planet’s resources and people’s security.

If Hurricane Sandy was a wake-up call for many in the United States to the kind of extreme weather that climate change is expected to bring, Typhoon Bopha, which struck the Philippines a month later, is a reminder of what makes developing regions even more vulnerable to these changes.

Despite progress over the years, Ethiopia’s Guraghe zone, located in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People’s Region, faces many development challenges. As senior monitoring and evaluation officer in the Guraghe People’s Self-help Development Organization (GPSDO), I have been working in this region for more than five years trying to reduce poverty and improve socio-economic development. The organization as a whole has been here for more than 50.

Since the integrated population, health, and environment (PHE) approach is relatively new in international development, donors, partners, and implementers want to know how it’s improving people’s lives. In the PHE community, we believe that combining efforts to address natural resource management, reproductive health, and livelihoods is making a difference in places where rapid population growth combines with poverty and environment degradation. But to know for sure and be able to convince others, we need to have data to support those beliefs.

It is well known that public health issues that affect the world’s most vulnerable populations – food insecurity, maternal and child health, water- and sanitation-related disease, and resource scarcity – are inextricably linked. Where these linkages are strongest, experience on the ground has shown that community-based integrated approaches to development provide more effective and sustainable solutions over vertical, sector-based programs. But so far, there are very few comprehensive evaluations providing strong quantitative evidence of this advantage.

1.8 million food producers using improved technologies or management practices. Nearly 9 million children reached through nutrition programs. 2.4 million hectares under improved technologies or management practices. New mechanisms for donor coordination. A forward-looking agricultural research agenda. Innovative private-sector partnerships to support smallholder farmers. These are among the successes reported for the first three years of Feed the Future, the U.S. government’s new global hunger and food security initiative.