Given growing awareness about environmental change and how it affects human life, it is perhaps not surprising there is also a growing audience for environmental filmmaking. At the 2014 Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital on March 25, the Wilson Center premiered ECSP’s latest documentary, Scaling the Mountain: Protecting Forests for Families in Nepal. Together with Heart of Iron, a recent film on mining in the Congo Basin, the event took viewers into some of the world’s most remote forests to see how their inhabitants are adapting to rapid changes in the natural resources on which they depend.

If current projections hold, Africa’s population will more than double in 40 years, putting more people at risk of food, water, health, and economic insecurity as the climate changes, as well as negating progress made in reducing carbon emissions per person. But what if it didn’t? [Video Below]

Just months after popular uprisings toppled Tunisia and Egypt’s authoritarian regimes, a trio of complex-system researchers published a brief article linking these demonstrations with high levels of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s international Food Price Index. Marco Lagi, Karla Bertrand, and Yaneer Bar-Yam’s model, which predicts outbreaks of deadly social conflict when the index tops 210, has since become a popular explanation wielded by many for bouts of popular unrest, including the Arab Spring and overthrow of Ukraine’s government. But were food prices really an underlying “hidden” cause for the start of a wave of instability that is still being felt today?

The global maternal health agenda has been largely defined by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for the last decade and half, but what will happen after they expire in 2015? What kind of framework is needed to continue the momentum towards eliminating preventable maternal deaths and morbidities? [Video Below]

Blue Ventures has become a leader in the population, health, and environment (PHE) community through its work with the remote, semi-nomadic Vezo people living along Madagascar’s southwestern coast. In a new short documentary, The Freedom to Choose: Empowering Communities to Live With the Sea, Blue Ventures describes how their approach has helped the Vezo respond to the combined challenges of resource scarcity, poor reproductive health, and unsustainable livelihoods.

Last year a Kiribati man, Ioane Teitiota, claimed asylum in New Zealand, stating that his home island, which is on average just two meters above sea level, was becoming uninhabitable thanks to rising seas. So-called “king tides” routinely wash over entire portions of the archipelago.

It was a scorching hot April afternoon in Keur Moussa, a small farming community about 60 kilometers outside Dakar, Senegal. The landscape was mostly barren and very dry, and a fine red dust settled into our clothes as we walked with community leaders to learn about their efforts to cope with a changing environment. In this part of the world, adapting to climate change is figuring out how to manage water: how to survive for long periods without it, and what to do when too much comes at unexpected times.