USAID funding is “far outstripped” by private investment and business relationships in “nearly every country” in which it works – and that’s a good thing, according to USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah. [Video Below]

As the war in Syria shows no signs of letting up, a recent article in Middle Eastern Studies put forward the hypothesis that the brutal conflict was triggered by government mismanagement of the country’s recent drought, which lasted from 2006 to 2010. It’s a story we’ve heard before.

While climate change has enjoyed a recent spike in news coverage, journalists face a constant challenge to bring sustained attention to other environmental stories, including resource scarcity, the changing oceans, and demographic change. [Video Below]

What are the environmental implications of changing household sizes? A recent article by Mason Bradbury, M. Nils Peterson, and Jianguo Liu, published in Population and Environment, analyzes data from 213 countries over 400 years and finds the average number of occupants per home tends to decline as population grows. This dynamic, they write, indicates that accommodating housing could prove to be one of “the greatest environmental challenges of the twenty-first century.” As countries develop and urbanize, “according to convergence theory, household size decreases (often from greater than five to less than three).” Other cultural shifts, like increasing divorce rates, urban sprawl driven by rising affluence, decreasing numbers of multigenerational households, and larger houses (in the United States, homes more than doubled in size between 1950 and 2002, according to the article) compound the issue. As population growth continues in parts of the world, these trends pose critical questions for conservation and environmental sustainability, since “households are the end consumers of most natural resources and ecosystem services.”

The pork industry in China accounts for 65 percent of domestic meat consumption, but also produces 1.29 billion metric tons of waste every year. China’s growing appetite for meat has put tremendous pressure on the livestock sector, which now produces three times more waste than industrial sources, and created a series of environmental and food safety issues.

Earlier this week, the Department of Defense released its first Quadrennial Defense Review since fiscal cliffs, shutdowns, and spending cuts hit the federal government. Not surprisingly, “austerity” shows up in almost every chapter of the report. What shows up even more? Climate change. For the second QDR in a row, the Pentagon has called out climate change as a “significant challenge for the United States and the world at large.”

In Lake Victoria and Lake Chilwa basins, interconnected development challenges defy sectoral boundaries, said experts at the Wilson Center on February 10. According to Deepa Pullanikkatil of Leadership for Environment and Development and Doreen Othero of the Lake Victoria Basin Commission, growing populations, shrinking resource bases, and persistent human health concerns demonstrate the need for integrated development approaches that combine population, health, and environmental (PHE) interventions. “We need different sectors working together to achieve the greater goal,” said Pullanikkatil. [Video Below]