Resilience is increasingly recognized as a powerful concept to help practitioners, academics, and policymakers better understand how people respond to shocks and stressors, and how those responses can be linked to longer-term positive or negative development outcomes, such as wellbeing or food (in)security.

Last month, the world came to Copenhagen to focus on how to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for girls and women. The Women Deliver Conference, the largest gathering on girls’ and women’s health and rights in the last decade, was a huge success. Convening over 5,700 likeminded people from 169 countries was important to reenergize the movement and inspire action. Preaching to the converted is sometimes important. But now it’s time to focus on those who are not yet converted.

How will the 10 billion people expected to be living on Earth by 2050 obtain sufficient and nutritious food? This is one of the greatest challenges humanity faces. Global food systems must supply enough calories and protein for a growing human population and provide important micronutrients such as iron, zinc, omega-3 fatty acids, and vitamins.

In principle, development organizations and donors have known that gender dynamics affect the success or failure of their efforts for some time. In practice, overturning cultural mores while at the same time improving health outcomes, incomes, or food security can be difficult. [Video Below]

Anyone visiting Singapore, as I did recently, quickly realizes it is exceptional. A tiny, rich, stable city-state of nearly 6 million people perched uneasily in a region of sprawling mega-countries full of poverty and instability, it also a thriving free market trading and financial center that is meticulously planned and where 80 percent of people live in public housing.

A report by the European Union on global food security finds 240 million people are in food stress thanks to conflict, refugee situations, flooding, drought, and El Niño. Part of a 2012 commitment by the EU to better target the root causes of food insecurity, the report analyzes the hunger situation in 70 countries and provides deeper analysis for 20.

Population, reproductive health, and environmental sustainability are inextricably linked. Growing populations place increasing demands on the environment, while meeting the reproductive health needs of populations usually slows their growth. Often, however, policymakers, scholars, and journalists discuss these issues separately, as if unrelated.

In the southwestern part of Indonesian Borneo, known as Kalimantan, there’s a small town on the outskirts of an incredibly diverse forest where the community has turned from illegal logging to stewards of the land.