Maternal mortality causes 56,000 deaths every year in India, accounting for 20 percent of maternal deaths around the world, said John Townsend, vice president and director of the Population Council’s reproductive health program. It is a key battleground for maternal health advocates. But maternal health is sometimes eclipsed by other major health and development issues on the sub-continent. For example, nearly five times as many people suffer from HIV/AIDS and more than 400 million people live on less than $1.25 a day. [Video Below]

Environmental security and international development aren’t typical movie-going fare, but at the 2013 DC Environmental Film Festival, ECSP premiered two short documentaries with unique environmental stories: Healthy People, Healthy Environment: Integrated Development in Tanzania shows how improving health services and environmental conservation can empower coastal communities in Africa; and Transcending Boundaries: Perspectives from the Central Albertine Rift Transfrontier Protected Area Network explores the opportunities for “peace parks” along the shared borders of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Sub-Saharan Africa is perhaps the riskiest place for a woman to give birth. According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), African women comprise approximately 56 percent of the maternal deaths and 91 percent of HIV-related maternal deaths worldwide every year. In order to bring life into this world, women in Africa literally must put their own lives on the line.

“The scale and the impact of disasters today can be greater than anything we’ve previously experienced,” said Laurie Mazur at the Wilson Center on March 18. “The proliferation of disasters has gotten a lot of people talking about resilience, about how we can lessen our risk and how we can recover more quickly from disasters of all kinds.” [Video Below]

“There is a huge gap between climate science, policymakers, and the end-users, in terms of understanding climate change and adaptation, and how that relates to conflict or peace,” concluded 26 experts from more than 10 countries across sub-Saharan Africa at the Wilson Center last fall. But “climate change adaptation is crucial to achieving Africa’s aspirations for peace, security, and sustainable development.”

“We need dynamic approaches. We can’t just keep going with the single sector approach and hoping that a conservation project will do really more than it’s intended to do,” said ECSP’s Multimedia Editor Sean Peoples in an interview with Dialogue at the Wilson Center. “These people are living integrated lives. How can we have integrated solutions for them?”

“However rapid change has been over the past couple decades, the rate of change will accelerate in the future,” states the newest quadrennial report from the National Intelligence Council (NIC), Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds. Released late last year, the report identifies the “game-changers, megatrends, and black swans” that may determine the trajectory of world affairs over the next 15 years, including demographic dynamics and natural resource scarcity. [Video Below]

Some 52 percent of the world’s population lives in cities, a proportion that will only grow throughout the next few decades. Understanding the health challenges facing urban residents is crucial for those who seek to improve human health, especially since many of these challenges differ from those facing inhabitants of rural areas, where global health resources have traditionally been concentrated. At a private meeting on March 4 at the Wilson Center, experts described how factors ranging from climate change and greenhouse gas emissions to reproductive health and rights impact urban health.