The BALANCED initiative in Tanzania’s Saadani National Park, “the only terrestrial park in the country with a contiguous marine area,” released the results of a 2012 progress survey on its efforts to create community champions for sustainable natural resource management and family planning awareness. Compared to the last survey in 2009, they found increased family planning awareness, higher contraceptive distribution and usage, and improved discussion and acceptance of contraceptive use from male partners. BALANCED-trained community-based distributors provided contraception to “31 percent of all pill users and 21 percent of all condom users.” Survey results also show a greater community awareness of the impact of individual and collective actions on the surrounding biosphere. The report calls for the continued training of community-based distributors and PHE “champions,” along with outreach to the private sector in order to ensure training and distribution can continue without the permanent presence of the BALANCED Project.

The Population Council’s annual report highlights new work from one of the largest organizations doing research on the lives of adolescent girls in the developing world. Of particular note is the Council’s Adolescent Girls Empowerment Program, a four-year study launched in May which will involve 42,000 girls in seven countries – Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Guatemala, India, Tanzania, and Zambia. The aim is to evaluate successful strategies for helping girls avoid child marriage, sexually transmitted infections, and unintended pregnancies at a critical juncture in their lives. Council President Peter Donaldson writes that young girls are “one of the potentially most influential figures in the developing world.” A typical 12-year-old girl “in the next few years…will either abandon or continue her schooling, be pushed into marriage and childbearing, or develop a sense of proud ownership of her physical self… As her future is reconfigured, so is ours.”

USAID’s annual report to Congress on its global health programs breaks down the broad array of initiatives carried out each year “from the American people” to prevent child and maternal deaths, provide safe access to water, combat infectious disease, and deliver HIV/AIDS relief, among other priorities. Maternal and child health are of particular focus, with the agency helping to launch the Child Survival Call to Action, London Summit on Family Planning, and U.S. Government Action Plan on Children in Adversity last year. The authors report significant declines in maternal and newborn mortality rates for priority countries and the establishment of “national contraceptive security strategies” in 36 out of 47 USAID-supported countries since 2003. “All of these efforts align under U.S. goals to end extreme poverty and promote peace and prosperity worldwide, which result in improved security at home and better markets for U.S. businesses abroad,” writes Assistant Administrator Dr. Ariel Pablos-Méndez.

Temperatures in the Arctic have increased at twice the global rate over the past 40 years, vaulting the region to international prominence as an emerging theater for maritime transportation and competition over newly uncovered resources.

The international community should start strategizing now to manage the ambitions of circumpolar states and minimize the potential for conflict, write authors Rob Huebert, Heather Exner-Pirot, Adam Lajeunesse, and Jay Gulledge in a report. Published by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, Climate Change and International Security: The Arctic as a Bellwether explores the geopolitical implications of climate change in the Arctic and puts forth several recommendations for policymakers to consider. Huebert et al. write that “maintaining security and peace in the Arctic will require adapting policies and institutions to the emerging environment there.” They recommend that Arctic states strengthen existing multilateral agreements by, for example, advocating the accession of the United States into the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Further, they propose that the Arctic Council lifts its ban on discussing security issues in order to become a forum for meaningful discussion.

Although climate change is a global phenomenon, developing countries – especially urban centers – are the most vulnerable to the negative health impacts of climate change.  In “Urban Governance of Climate Change and Health,” a working paper for the Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research, author Siri Bjerkreim Hellevik reviews the existing literature on governments’ responses to climate change and health in developing urban centers. Overall, Hellevik concludes that there is a substantial need for more research specifically linking the two. She offers several recommendations for urban policymakers to consider, including developing an integrated and multi-level approach, and recognizing that human health and urban development are issues of global justice.

In “On Demographic and Democratic Transitions,” published in the February edition of Population and Development Review, author Tim Dyson postulates that the so-called “demographic transition” – a two-step process in which diminishing mortality rates are followed by decreases in total fertility – is an important predictor of a society’s transition from autocracy to democracy. Specifically, Dyson suggests that the population surge resulting from a decline in mortality may tend to destabilize pre-democratic regimes, while a subsequent drop in fertility rates may empower women and raise the median age of a population, thus paving the way for democracy to emerge. Dyson demonstrates a statistically significant correlation between population aging and inclination toward democracy, echoing the work of New Security Beat contributor, Richard Cincotta.

Many of the fastest growing countries in the world today are also the poorest. A recent bulletin from the National Transfer Accounts Project, “Lower Income Countries and the Demographic Dividend,” examines what it takes for lower-income countries to experience a demographic dividend and the economic growth associated with that period. Achieving the demographic dividend is dependent on a country achieving low fertility rates, which, when coming from a period of high growth, temporarily increases the ratio of the working-age population to dependents, like children and the elderly. For lower-income countries to do this, the report recommends that policymakers invest in healthcare and education programs and focus on boosting the labor force participation rate. Looking forward, the report advises that it is not too early for lower-income countries to begin developing social security and pension programs to support the latter stages of the demographic transition too.

India’s Maoist (or “Naxalite”) insurgency has resulted in more than 9,000 deaths in the last decade and famously been called the country’s “single biggest internal security challenge” by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. In, Renewable Resource Shocks and Conflict in India’s Maoist Belt, a working paper for the Center for Global Development, Devesh Kapur, Kishore Gawande, and Shanker Satyanth present their econometric analysis of the conflict and suggest that there is a link with natural resource depletion.