“When women become pregnant…their nutrient needs shoot through the roof,” said Amy Webb Girard of Emory University’s School of Public Health in this interview with ECSP and the Global Health Initiative. Girard explains that under-nutrition is a major problem for women – especially pregnant women – in resource-poor settings.

Proponents of integrated development have always faced significant barriers, but with a new focus on international aid from the Obama administration, the tide may be turning. To fully harness this momentum, Gib Clarke argues in a new ECSP brief that the population-health-environment (PHE) community must solidify its research base, reach out to new partners, and push for flexible funding and programming.

This piece first appeared on the website of the Haiti Regeneration Initiative – a new collaborative venture between the UN, the government of Haiti, the Earth Institute at Columbia University, Catholic Relief Services, and a wide range of other implementing partners.

In 2010, Haiti endured a year like no other. The country was struck by a devastating earthquake, a cholera epidemic, floods, violence, and political uncertainty. At the same time, Haiti witnessed heroic rescue and relief efforts and an enormous demonstration of international goodwill. Today, recovery and reconstruction are taking place, albeit at a frustratingly slow pace and not currently at the scale of existing needs.

“While we know that natural resources alone are neither necessary nor sufficient to drive conflict, we do know that competition over resources and their revenues often helps to drive conflict and to sustain it over time,” said Cynthia Brady, a senior conflict advisor at USAID’s Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation. “We also know that climate change impacts are going to interact with those dynamics, so we need to better understand how, in order to really program effectively against it in the future.”

“It’s really important to link the integrated PHE approach with the policies and strategies of the country,” says Annie Wallace, who worked as a PHE technical advisor with USAID’s Global Health Fellows Program in Ethiopia. “Because if you don’t have political buy-in from the decision-makers and the leaders, then it’s going to be really difficult to justify the allocation of different funds for these projects to be expanded to other regions, or expanded in scale, or even to expand outside of the country.”

This PHE Champion profile was produced by the BALANCED Project.

“Now, people can plan their families and know how to use a condom,” says Abdalah Masingano as he proudly tells how his community has come to accept integrated population, health, and environment (PHE) activities.

 “The purpose of the whole debate about peak water is to help raise awareness about the nature of the world’s water problems and to help drive toward solutions,” says the Pacific Institute’s Peter Gleick. But Gleick asserts that in the same way certain countries have been contending with “peak oil” concerns in recent years, they may soon also have to deal with “peak water” as well.

Unlike oil, water is largely a renewable resource, but countries in Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere are pumping groundwater faster than aquifers can replenish naturally. Gleick explains “there will be a peak of production in many of those places and eventually the food that we grow with that water or the widgets that we make from the factories that use that water will be nonsustainable and production will have to drop.”

The New Security Beat’s 2010 top ten (measured by unique pageviews) included guest contributions from Marc Levy, Todd Walters, and the UK’s Royal Society, a post by West Point Cadet Marie Hokenson, a video feature with Peter Gleick, and posts on global enviro-security hot spots Afghanistan, India, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Yemen: