“Midwives play a vital role in the health care of mothers and babies,” said Samara Ferrara, a midwife from Mexico, at the Wilson Center on February 27. But in many parts of the world they face a confluence of stressors that make working conditions miserable: low and irregular pay; harassment and disrespect from both patients and doctors; and little supplies, training, or say in the policy dialogue about maternal health.

As the 1990s drew to a close, there was a sense that much of the momentum gained at the first Earth Summit on sustainable development, a positive, affirming environmental narrative, was waning.

As climate change threatens the stability of ecosystems around the world, the preservation of forests is seen as a “win-win” solution to curbing planet-warming emissions while producing value for developing country economies.

Global poverty has been reduced dramatically over the past two decades. Less than 11 percent of the world’s population were living in extreme poverty in 2013 compared to 35 percent in 1990. But improvements have largely come in stable countries. Many of the remaining pockets of extreme poverty are in “fragile states,” countries that are vulnerable to internal and external shocks and can easily tip into crisis when faced with an environmental, economic, social, or political change.

For weeks, the primatologists had followed a group of Grauer’s gorillas over rugged terrain – hacking through dense rainforest; following knife-edged ravines; and crossing a nearly impenetrable mountainous landscape in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

In a recent article published in PLOS ONE, Juliann E. Aukema, Narcisa G. Pricope, Gregory J. Husak, and David Lopez-Carr address the impacts of climate change and population growth on areas with vulnerable ecosystem services and biodiversity, and in reverse, how degraded ecosystem services effect vulnerable populations. The authors analyze locations between 50 degrees latitude north and south that had changing precipitation patterns in the past 30 years.