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.

Yunnan province is a microcosm of the intertwined natural resource challenges facing China. Dams, development, deforestation, drought, and climate change threaten China’s most biodiverse province – all while it increases its exports of agricultural products and electricity to China’s coastal provinces. These competing demands bring into question the sustainability of China’s development paradigm and the country’s environmental security.

From the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to Superstorm Sandy, the last decade has seen an incredible array of natural disasters. Of course, disasters of all kinds are nothing new, but, thanks to the growing scale and interconnectedness of the human enterprise – and the damage we have done to the natural world – the frequency, scale, and consequences of today’s calamities are truly without precedent.

The original version of this article, by Stewart M. Patrick, appeared on the Council on Foreign Relations’ The Internationalist blog.

Not long ago, concerns about environmental degradation were marginal in U.S. national security deliberations. What a difference climate change has made. Foreign policy officials and experts are starting to recognize profound linkages between planetary health, economic prosperity, and international security. These connections were on full view last Wednesday, when the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) teamed up with Conservation International (CI) to convene a symposium, “Global Resources, the U.S. Economy, and National Security.”

“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?”

While it can be convenient to think of human health and the environment as unrelated silos, they are in fact closely related. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) recently released a report underscoring this point especially for Africa, where large numbers of people are directly reliant on natural resources for their livelihoods.

The original version of this article, by Michael D. Lemonick, appeared on Climate Central.

Water resources, energy, and land use are so mutually dependent that climate-related disruptions to any one of them could lead to economically devastating ripple effects – especially as a growing population puts increasing strains on all three. That’s one conclusion of a recent report issued by a federal advisory committee charged with assessing how climate change has already affected the U.S., and what the future holds.