The original version of this article, by Susannah Fisher, appeared on the International Institute for Environment and Development.

Nepal’s vulnerability to a warming climate became clear in May 2012 when the Seti River burst its banks during flash floods and landslides that killed more than 60 people. Scientists say such events are likely to become more common as the world warms, so communities need to adapt.

Six years after beginning a marine conservation program focused on octopus fishery management in southwest Madagascar, “we can proudly say that we have made a real impact as an organization providing health care,” said Dr. Vik Mohan, medical director of Blue Ventures and a practicing doctor in the United Kingdom.

“We’ve got real pressure on key natural resources: food, water, energy, and land,” says Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti, the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s special representative on climate change, in this week’s podcast. “But what we haven’t got, if I can use the words of Winston Churchill, we haven’t got ‘action this day.’”

“Morisetti spoke at the Wilson Center on June 6 for the launch of The Climate and Energy Nexus: Challenges and Opportunities for Transatlantic Security, by CNA and the Royal United Services Institute. As climate change threatens stability in some places, energy security has emerged as a key vulnerability to Western militaries’ abilities to respond to conflict and assist in disaster relief operations, says Morisetti.

“In the post-Cold War period, the challenges of energy, environment, climate change, and water have become very much a part of our fundamental transatlantic relationship,” said CNA General Counsel Sherri Goodman, launching a new report on U.S.-EU security at the Wilson Center. [Video Below]

At a major summit in London this summer the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation launched one of the most significant efforts yet to revitalize commitments around the world towards providing universal access to family planning. More than 220 million women around the world – mostly in developing countries – want to delay or avoid pregnancy but are not using effective methods of contraception. Meeting the unmet needs of these women could save the lives of hundreds of thousands of mothers and millions of infants, not to mention significantly impact the future of human development. But the last decade has been a period of relative neglect by international donors.

Publish What You Fund recently released its 2012 Aid Transparency Index, an annual review of 43 indicators assessing to what degree information about policies, strategies, and individual projects are published for public consumption by aid donors. These indicators include things like disclosing the type of aid given (e.g., grant, loan, export credit, debt relief), the quality of disclosure policies, and the online presence of centralized, public databases of all the organization’s activities.

People are still talking about this summer’s London Summit on Family Planning, which was hosted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK’s Department of International Development (DIFD) on July 11. On Monday here at the Wilson Center, the Environmental Change and Security Program featured representatives from USAID, DFID, and Gates Foundation for a standing-room only panel discussion of the landmark event.

“We established [the Climate Change Security Program] as a methodology of exposing the defense community in the U.K. and Europe to some of the more nuanced security debates that are going on around climate change, environmental change, and resource shortages,” said Tobias Feakin, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies (RUSI) in an interview with ECSP.