Eighty-two percent of experts surveyed by Foreign Policy and the Center for American Progress for the 2008 Terrorism Index said that the threat posed by competition for scarce resources is growing, a 13 percent increase over last year.

China Environment Forum Director Jennifer Turner maintains that China is facing “multiple water crises” due to pollution and rising demand in an interview with E&ETV;.

The Population Reference Bureau has two new articles examining the nexus between population and environment. One explores the relationship between forest conservation and the growth of indigenous Amazonian populations, while the other provides an excellent examination of population’s role in the current food crisis, with a special emphasis on East Africa.

Ethiopia’s rapid population growth “has accelerated land degradation, as forests are converted to farms and pastures, and households use unsustainable agricultural methods to eke out a living on marginal land,” writes Ruth Ann Wiesenthal-Gold in “Audubon on the World Stage: International Family Planning and Resource Management.” Wiesenthal-Gold attended a November 2007 study tour of integrated population, health, and environment (PHE) development programs in Ethiopia sponsored by the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club.

High population growth, limited arable land, and soaring rice prices in Lao People’s Democratic Republic mean that land access is critical for food security. At the same time, there is immense pressure to convert forests and small-scale agricultural land into commercial plantations for rubber, coffee, and other valuable crops. Together, these factors are significant threats not only to people, but to wildlife and biodiversity as well. They are also resulting in the emergence of new tensions between people and wildlife across the Lao landscape.

“[O]ver the last three decades, approximately 75% of new emerging human infectious diseases have been zoonotic”—transmitted between humans and animals. So states the final report of the One Health Initiative Task Force, warning that “[o]ur increasing interdependence with animals and their products may well be the single most critical risk factor to our health and well-being with regard to infectious diseases.” The One Health Initiative was established by the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) in 2006, and the task force was assembled in early 2007 to articulate its goals and vision. Released last month, the report stresses that “[b]y working together, more can be accomplished to improve health worldwide, and the veterinary medical profession has the responsibility to assume a major leadership role in that effort.”

In our interconnected world, human, animal, and environmental health are linked in numerous and complex ways. One organization tackling these connections is the Ugandan NGO Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH). Founded and directed by Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, CTPH works to bolster human and animal health in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park (BINP), home to half of the world’s remaining mountain gorilla population. Zoonotic disease transmission is especially prevalent in remote areas like BINP, where people frequently live in close proximity to animals, and is exacerbated by the fact that these remote areas are often woefully underserved by government services like health care. “They’re the last people the government thinks about,” said Kalema-Zikusoka in a presentation at the Wilson Center on May 8, 2008.

The One Health Initiative demonstrates that people are starting to think seriously about the intersections between human, animal, and environmental health. “We are standing at the precipice of a health care transformation,” said Task Force Chair Lonnie King. “[D]isease prevention and health promotion in people, animals and our environment have become a critical strategic need.”

Speaking at the Wilson Center in November 2005, King expressed a desire for a program like the One Health Initiative. “We have to build infrastructures in health systems in developing countries,” he said, “not just human health, but animal health, too.” At the same event, William Karesh, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Field Veterinary Program, said, “[t]he concept we have is ‘one world, one health.’ There is the division of human health and wildlife health. But really, there’s only one health.” The idea of integrated health finally seems to be catching on.

“The health of our planet is inextricably linked to the health of people,” says Judy Oglethorpe, director of World Wildlife Federation’s Community Conservation program in “The Human Face of Conservation” (WWF Focus, July/August, 2008). While the links between population, health, and environmental degradation are fairly well understood, environmental groups have largely neglected to incorporate family planning or health programs in their conservation efforts.

Several WWF initiatives are breaking this trend, spreading awareness of ecological issues by integrating health or livelihood strategies. In Mozambique, illegal industrial fishing was leading to conflict with local fishermen, who were left with smaller catches of smaller fish. The WWF program helped authorities crack down on illegal fishing and set aside “replenishment zones” for fish to spawn and grow. As a result, local fishermen “have seen dramatic increases in the size of individual fish and in their overall catch outside these zones – and in their earnings,” allowing them to feed their families.

WWF is also diversifying its focus by partnering with other organizations to bring family planning services to poor communities, including in the Khata corridor of Nepal. “It’s really difficult for women living in remote regions to have access to modern family planning and basic healthcare,” said Population, Health, and Environment senior program officer Cara Honzak. By providing basic family planning services, women in these communities are able to control the growth of their families. With this opportunity, it is easier for communities to support and manage themselves, and reduced population pressures on the environment help maintain their local forest ecosystems.

Programs such as these are popular and effective, because by considering both human and natural needs, both sides can be winners. Said the manager of an initiative in Namibia, “When communities can earn as much – or more – by conserving wild land as they can by burning and planting it, potential conflicts can be turned into win-win situations for both people and wildlife.”

“Public health and public health infrastructure and systems in developed and developing countries must be seen as strategic and security issues that deserve international public health resource monitoring attention from disaster managers, urban planners, the global humanitarian community, World Health Organization authorities, and participating parties to war and conflict,” argue Frederick Burkle and P. Gregg Greenough of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative in a new article in Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness. Burkle, who is currently a public policy scholar at the Wilson Center, will discuss public health management after natural disasters at the Center on June 17th.

In their article, “Impact of Public Health Emergencies on Modern Disaster Taxonomy, Planning, and Response,” Burkle and Greenough discuss the public health consequences of disasters, which they classify as natural; failures of human or technological systems; or conflict-based. The authors contend that disasters’ indirect effects are often overlooked, despite the fact that they continue months and even years after the event. Disaster severity is typically measured by direct morbidity and mortality; however, Burkle and Greenough highlight the need to account for the indirect deaths and illnesses caused by the devastation of public health and other infrastructure, poor and overcrowded living conditions, displacement, food insecurity, and disrupted livelihoods. Furthermore, as acute deaths decrease, humanitarian aid wanes—at a time when it is desperately needed to rebuild public health infrastructure.

In the case of conflict-based disasters,“health care and other essential services . . . may not return to baseline for more than a decade.” The authors note that in 2004, the Iraqi Ministry of Health announced that more lives had been lost to insufficient health services than to violence. Yet the former fails to garner the same attention and condemnation as the latter.

The devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina demonstrated that the safety, health, and infrastructure of even the wealthiest nations are at risk. No nation can afford to overlook the challenges highlighted by Burkle and Greenough.

An article in today’s Washington Post explores the interconnected problems of poverty and rapid population growth in the Philippines. Many factors contribute to the country’s high poverty rate, including corruption and traditional land ownership laws, but a birth rate that is among the highest in Asia is also significant. Eighty percent of the Filipino population is Catholic, and both the influential Catholic Church and the current government—in power for the last five years—oppose modern family planning methods. Filipinos are permitted to buy contraception, but no national government funds may be used to purchase contraception for the millions who want it but cannot afford it.

The situation may be poised to worsen, notes the Post: “Distribution of donated contraceptives in the government’s nationwide network of clinics ends this year, as does a contraception-commodities program paid for by the U.S. Agency for International Development. For years it has supplied most of the condoms, pills and intrauterine devices used by poor Filipinos.”

Yet the story is not entirely gloomy. A recent brief by Joan Castro and Leona D’Agnes of PATH Foundation Philippines, Inc. describes IPOPCORM, a development program that has successfully delivered family planning services to impoverished Filipino communities while simultaneously promoting environmental conservation and overall human health. Based on this success, some municipal governments in IPOPCORM’s service areas have set aside money in their budgets to purchase family planning commodities directly. A major conference in 2008 (building on an earlier conference in 2006) addressed population, health, and environment connections in the Philippines; featured speakers included former Congressman Nereus Acosta and Joan Castro.

The theme of this year’s World Health Day, observed on April 7, was “Protecting Health From Climate Change.” This World Health Organization report outlines many of the links between climate change and human health.

Kenya’s post-election strife has decimated its once-thriving nature tourism industry, reports Reuters. The displacement of hundreds of thousands of people has driven up demand for bush meat, and in the absence of tourism revenues, reserves can no longer afford to pay rangers to protect the wildlife.

Per capita water availability in the Middle East and North Africa will be halved by 2050, estimates the World Bank, so it is critical for governments to address growing water scarcity now, including making agriculture—which accounts for 85 percent of total water use in the region—more water-efficient.

The Population Reference Bureau recently published several new resources on global family planning, including a data sheet on worldwide family planning and an article by James Gribble examining trends and patterns in family planning in West Africa. Gribble also recently co-authored an article on the successes and failures of Peru’s family planning policy, particularly among the poor.

An article published in Human Dimensions of Wildlife (subscription required) found that crop destruction by wildlife in three villages in northeastern Tanzania significantly reduced both food security and household income. The article recommends implementing several incentives—including microcredit for non-agricultural activities—for conservation.

A report from the Center for International and Strategic Studies’ Global Strategy Institute examines the future of water and energy in an increasingly urbanized Asia, with a particular focus on China.

The International Institute for Sustainable Development released a summary of the proceedings at the first African Water Week, which took place March 26-28, 2008.