Over the past few years, large-scale acquisition of land by foreign or domestic firms, be they public or private, have been making headlines. But although these “land grabs” have received a great deal of attention, their details remain largely unknown. Which countries are the primary investors? Which are the main targets? What is the land used for?

Adapting to the effects of climate change is increasingly becoming an important component of many international development efforts. But how that integration occurs and what it looks like is an open question. To help answer that, the Climate Change and African Political Stability Program (CCAPS) at the University of Texas at Austin recently released a new database that for the first time tracks all the climate-related aid in one country – Malawi.

“Why should you consider taking a demography course in college?” That’s the question Joel Cohen, noted demographer and professor at Rockefeller and Columbia University, looks to answer in a 45-minute introduction to demography produced by the Floating University and released for free on YouTube.

In 2011, a record 34 billion cubic tons of carbon dioxide were emitted from man-made sources. Half the emitted CO₂ stays in the atmosphere, about a quarter is absorbed on land (as trees grow, for example), and the remainder is absorbed by the ocean. Unsurprisingly, this incredible amount of carbon dioxide significantly changes the ocean environment. Over time, increased absorption of carbon dioxide in the oceans has led to ocean acidification, and overall warming has also led to warming of ocean waters – both changes impact marine ecosystems and the people who rely on them.

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.

The water-energy-food nexus seems to be garnering more and more attention in the media and elsewhere, and it’s easy to see why: it’s a relatively simple way to illustrate how interconnected the world is today and the kind of domino-like effects that scarcity can have.

Around the world, as the most easily accessible natural resources are depleted, states are beginning to turn to more remote reserves to meet their needs and the shift may spark international tensions or even conflict, said Hampshire College professor Michael Klare in a recent interview with ECSP. “I worry very much about this growing global competition for the remaining resources in those parts of the world,” he said.

“Over the past several months, extreme weather and climate events seemed to have become the norm rather than the exception,” writes Kelly Levin for the World Resources Institute (WRI). Indeed, records have been broken around the world as countries experience unprecedented heat, drought, flooding, or other types of severe weather. And people are starting to take notice. A number of recent stories try to make sense of this wild weather and what, if anything, it has to do with climate change.