“Environmental degradation has measurable impacts on migration and presents humanity with unprecedented challenges,” writes Laurence Turbiana in The State of Environmental Migration, edited by François Gemenne  and Pauline Brücker of the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations and Dina Ionesco of the International Organization for Migration. The report presents the findings of students at the Paris School of International Affairs who examined a number of case studies in 2011, including sudden disasters like the floods in Thailand, Colombia, China, and Bangladesh, as well as slower-onset events like droughts in Somalia and Mexico. The editors conclude that “environmental migration, in its forced and voluntary forms, is a reality.”

As recently discussed by the National Intelligence Council, sub-Saharan Africa is home to both the most rapidly growing populations in the world and its fastest expanding cities. Save the Children’s recent report, Voices From Urban Africa: The Impact of Urban Growth on Children, explores the challenges faced by the continent’s youngest age cohort, revealing what forces are driving children and families to migrate to urban areas and the poverty many are experiencing upon getting there. In response to the report’s findings, the authors recommend training and deploying more health care workers, facilitating public-private dialogue to identify long-term water and sanitation solutions, improving access to jobs and skills training, expanding access to early childhood care, and strengthening the education system to ensure widespread attendance. Compiled from 1,050 interviews, the report is unique for its first-hand accounts of the daily lives of children, their families, and community members.

One of the greatest challenges in addressing climate change is the uncertainty of outcomes. The world is warming and greenhouse gases are accumulating at an unprecedented rate – what does that mean for the future of human development? In Barry B. Hughes, Mohammod T. Irfan, Jonathan D. Moyer, Dale S. Rothman, and José R. Solórzano’s paper, “Exploring Future Impacts of Environmental Constraints on Human Development,” they describe three possible futures for the world (a base line scenario, an environmental challenge scenario, and an environmental disaster scenario) and their potential impact on the indicators of the Human Development Index (HDI). The environmental disaster projection features a flat-lining HDI starting around 2015, with global life expectancy at birth seven years shorter than the baseline in 2060. The report also notes that the future of the planet will be drastically different if the world population peaks “well before 2100,” as is the case in the base line scenario, or continues to grow, as it does in the other scenarios.

UNFPA’s recently released State of World Population 2012 brings family planning to the center of the development debate. “There is indisputable evidence that when family planning is integrated into broader economic and social development initiatives, it can have a positive multiplier effect on human development and the well-being of entire nations,” the authors write. The report employs a rights-based approach to make the case for universal access to family planning – a goal which we are far from as 222 million women from the developing world currently have an unmet need for modern contraceptives. Meeting this need and improving quality of reproductive healthcare elsewhere would cost an additional $4.1 billion a year, but save approximately $5.7 billion in maternal and newborn health services. Other recommendations include increasing financial support and political commitment to ensure that family planning is of high quality, reducing the number of unintended pregnancies and abortions, including emergency contraception in family planning services, and engaging boys and men.

While climate change will undoubtedly have an impact on societies throughout the world, researchers are still debating whether or not it will cause conflict. John O’Loughlin, Frank D.W. Witmer, Andrew M. Linke, Arlene Laing, Andrew Gettelman, and Jimy Dudhia use a quantitative approach to tackle some of “sweeping generalizations” that have come to characterize this debate in a new study, “Climate Variability and Conflict Risk in East Africa, 1990-2009,” published last month in PNAS. They found that while there is “no statistically significant relationship” between precipitation and conflict, increased heat is correlated with more conflict in East Africa. Still, they also found that other factors, like population size and the space-time lag for violence, predict conflict more reliably than either of the climate-related elements.

Tanzania’s Saadani National Park is a hotbed of biodiversity and, like other national parks in the region, it’s surrounded by human activity. A report by the BALANCED Project, “Population, Health, Environment Situational Analysis for the Saadani National Park Area, Tanzania,” provides a snapshot of the population, health, and environment situation inside the park to serve as a baseline for future activities of the Tanzania Coastal Management Partnership (TCMP) – a joint initiative of the government of Tanzania, USAID, and the University of Rhode Island’s Coastal Resources Center. A behavioral monitoring system implemented in June 2009 used surveys that reached a total of 437 respondents (54 percent women) from eight villages to analyze the “behaviors that positively and negatively influence the utilization and condition of natural resources.”  The surveys found that arable land is scarce, fisheries are being depleted, and people have inadequate access to healthcare, water, sanitation, fuel, and family planning resources. The results suggest a strong case for expanding TCMP’s existing integrated approach – combining HIV/AIDS, conservation, and livelihoods goals – to include promotion of positive behavior changes, particularly as they relate to family planning and the effects of population growth on biodiversity loss and resource depletion.

Devesh Kapur, Kishore Gawande, and Shanker Satyanath open their Center for Global Development working paper, “Renewable Resource Shocks and Conflict in India’s Maoist Belt,” with a crucial question: “Is there a causal relationship between shocks to renewable natural resources, such as agricultural and forest lands, and the intensity of conflict?” While the connection between the environment and conflict has been the focus of much study, Kapur et al. say that previous attempts have been plagued with “failure to address reverse causality and a failure to systematically control for alternative explanations for conflict.” Their report analyzes the relationship between the availability of resources and conflict by measuring rainfall, vegetation prevalence, and deaths due to the Maoist conflict in India. They find “a strong and substantively large relationship between adverse renewable resource shocks and the intensity of conflict,” and conclude that protecting the livelihoods of residents of the Maoist belt can help reduce violence. “Giving tribals greater access to forests and a range of forest products, whose consumption is the only available option during times of distress, can provide them with a critical self-insurance mechanism.”

The poorest households gain the least when countries reap the demographic dividend, according to a preliminary draft of a new study by four Harvard School of Public Health researchers. In “Microeconomic Foundations of the Demographic Dividend,” authors David Bloom, David Canning, Günther Fink, and Jocelyn Finlay write that 18 years of Demographic Health Surveys (DHSs) from 60 developing countries show that while declining fertility rates and dependency ratios can lead to rising incomes on a nationwide level, sub-nationally those trends occur unevenly and mostly benefit wealthier households. Poorer households, meanwhile, are likelier to see slower fertility declines, delaying the economic gains that can result from demographic transitions, and increasing inequality. Importantly, the authors emphasize that the study reflects “the early stages of the demographic transition”; long-term economic effects of fertility decline, they write, “remain ambiguous.”