The University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health recently received $15 million from the Fred H. Bixby Foundation to expand the Bixby Program in Population, Family Planning & Maternal Health into the Bixby Center for Population, Health, and Sustainability. The Bixby Center will highlight population’s impact on global public health, climate change, poverty, and civil and international conflict. “I think the huge challenge for the human race in the 21st century is whether we can move to a biologically sustainable way of life on this planet,” said Malcolm Potts, chair of the Bixby Center. “Population plays an essential role in that,” he added. The Bixby Center will also address the well-documented unmet need for family planning around the world.

Although it will be housed within the School of Public Health, the Bixby Center will partner with the Blum Center for Developing Economies, the Berkeley Center for Global Public Health, the Berkeley Population Center, and other initiatives.

The National Intelligence Council has released Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, an unclassified report seeking to identify a range of future security trends. As the Washington Post notes, the report “makes for sometimes grim reading in imagining a world of weak states bristling with weapons of mass destruction and unable to cope with burgeoning populations without adequate water and food.” ECSP hosted a review of an intermediate draft of the report in July 2008.

The United Nations, the U.S. Department of Defense, and several other militaries are spearheading an effort to fight climate change and ozone-depleting substances. The partnership comes out of a conference held in Paris earlier this month on the role of militaries in protecting the climate. Andrew Alder, who attended the conference, writes, “the Pentagon can also play a leading role in reducing carbon emissions, ironically helping to reduce the very threat for which it is preparing.”

In “Quantum of Solace,” James Bond goes up against a villain who takes control of a country’s water supply. Pacific Institute Director Peter Gleick thinks this is “art imitating life in many ways,” as he believes conflict over water will become more severe unless we develop and implement more efficient ways of using our limited freshwater resources.

“Data on rainfall patterns only weakly corroborate the claim that climate change explains the Darfur conflict,” argue Michael Kevane and Leslie Gray of Santa Clara University in “Darfur: rainfall and conflict,” a paper in Environmental Research Letters.

Human and animal diseases must be addressed before the different protected areas that make up the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area can be connected, according to “As the Fences Come Down: Emerging Concerns in Transfrontier Conservation Areas.”

Healthy People, Healthy Ecosystems is a new manual by the World Wildlife Fund on how to integrate health and family planning into existing conservation projects. It features examples of population-health-environment projects from the Philippines, Nepal, India, Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Central African Republic, Cameroon, and Uganda.

Released at the National Press Club on November 12, 2008, the UN Population Fund’s State of World Population 2008 encourages policymakers and the development community to embrace culturally aware approaches to achieving human rights such as gender equality and reproductive health. Noting the role local culture plays in these issues, the report makes suggestions for addressing traditional attitudes toward maternal mortality, female genital mutilation, honor killings, and contraceptive use, highlighting the need to develop alliances with local opinion leaders in program design and service delivery.

U.S. Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) urged both policymakers and development professionals to carry out development projects within the context of local cultural norms. According to Maloney, the Obama administration has promised to allocate funds to help implement the report’s recommendations. Azza Karam, senior culture advisor with UNFPA, explained that much development work still does not guarantee women’s rights and argued that State of World Population 2008 includes effective approaches to addressing harmful cultural practices. Karam encouraged the development community to approach culture pragmatically, demonstrating to local community leaders how changes in cultural practices benefit the whole community.

State of World Population 2008 devotes an entire chapter to the need to include women in post-conflict reconstruction, using case studies to demonstrate how gender equality can be incorporated into a variety of different peace interventions. The report pushes policymakers and program managers to endorse gender-sensitive approaches and abandon preconceptions that women lack the expertise to assist in long-term peacebuilding. Increasing women’s participation in post-conflict reconstruction “can help development practitioners mitigate some of the ill effects of conflict, minimize deterioration in gender relations and work with local communities and relevant stakeholders” to ensure women’s rights such as reproductive health and gender equality.

As U.S. governors and international climate representatives met at the Beverly Hills Hilton for California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s climate change summit on November 18, a group of Hollywood writers and producers—plus a few climate change experts—gathered on the other side of Los Angeles at the Skirball Cultural Center for “Changing Climate…Changing People: Connecting to the Biggest Story of Our Time,” a unique conference sponsored by the Population Media Center on how to incorporate climate change into mainstream TV and film.

Entertainment industry insiders like Sonny Fox emphasized that “earnest isn’t enough and won’t cut it”—that a show or film’s entertainment value cannot be compromised by its addressing serious issues like climate change impacts. Yet Chris Alexander, senior vice president of corporate communications for 20th Century Fox, showed that this is possible, with examples of how “The Simpsons,” “King of the Hill,” and “Boston Legal” have seamlessly incorporated environmental issues into jokes, dialogue, and storylines.

David Rambo, a writer and supervising producer for “CSI,” described how “CSI” has addressed climate change impacts in two separate shows: one that examined the surprisingly large effect of a degree or two difference in temperature; and another that explored the high concentration of pharmaceuticals in water that has been recycled due to water shortages. According to Rambo, after that episode aired, “CSI” received grateful letters from public officials and educators from around the country, who said that the fact that “CSI” had addressed water reuse had made it acceptable for them to broach this once-taboo topic.

The conference was also anchored by some heavy-hitters—Dr. Howard Frumkin, director of the National Center for Environmental Health/Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn (Ret.). Frumkin discussed the potential health impacts of climate change, which include increased levels of air pollution; higher incidence of allergies; geographic spread of vector-borne and waterborne diseases; severe disruptions to water and food supplies; and mental health problems, often resulting from exposure to natural disasters. McGinn explained that because climate change is a threat multiplier for instability, it could increase the risk of humanitarian disasters, failed states, civil conflict, extremism, competition over scarce natural resources, and mass migration.

In addition to panels, the conference also featured a one-act play, “Shuddering to Think,” about the challenges of incorporating serious issues into mainstream entertainment. It sounds dull—but was actually funny and incisive, thanks to sharp writing by Jon Robin Baird and adept acting by Bruce Davison, Scott Wolf, and Bradley Whitford, whom you may remember as Josh Lyman from The West Wing. Speaking after the performance about media’s power to convince the public to get serious about climate change, Whitford observed, “The press failed, the government failed, science failed—but Al Gore’s movie [An Inconvenient Truth] worked.”

“Time is pressing, and we need all hands on deck,” says Jean-Yves Pirot, an ecologist with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), on the urgent need for conservationists to look outside their sector for help in improving sustainable environmental management in developing countries. In a podcast with ECSP’s Gib Clarke, Pirot, who coordinated the “Healthy People, Healthy Environment” stream at the recent World Conservation Congress, discusses the challenges of integrating population and health into environment programs. He urges conservationists to forge synergies with health and development specialists in order to scale-up small, short-term projects and provide long-term health and environmental benefits to the poor.

“[T]he careful management that helped make Alaskan pollock a billion-dollar industry could unravel as the planet warms,” warns Kenneth Weiss of the Los Angeles Times. “Pollock and other fish in the Bering Sea are moving to higher latitudes as winter ice retreats and water temperatures rise. Alaskan pollock are becoming Russian pollock, swimming across an international boundary in search of food and setting off what could become a geopolitical dispute.”

Poor rains, lack of infrastructure, and a shortage of skilled technicians have contributed to water-related disease and local-level water conflicts in Zimbabwe, reports IPS News.

If the Tripa peat forests in Sumatra continue to be cleared to make way for palm oil plantations, not only will the habitat of the critically endangered Sumatran orangutan shrink further, but millions of tons of CO2 will be released into the atmosphere, accelerating global climate change, reports the Telegraph.

A report on Somalia by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says that one in six Somali children under the age of five is acutely malnourished and estimates that 43 percent of the country’s population will need humanitarian assistance through the end of the year. According to the report, poor rains, in addition to the worst levels of violence since 1990, have contributed to the humanitarian crisis.

“The number of tiger attacks on people is growing in India’s Sundarban islands as habitat loss and dwindling prey caused by climate change drives them to prowl into villages for food,” says an article from Reuters.

The current issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine (some abstracts available) focuses on the links between climate change and public health.

“Can Conservation Succeed with 9 Billion People?,” a panel at the recent Conservation Learning Exchange, was described as a “bang-up session” by Margaret Francis, who blogged about it.

In an open letter on water policy to the next U.S. president, Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute urges the next presidential administration to develop a national water policy; highlight national security issues related to water; expand the United States’ role in addressing global water problems; and integrate climate change into all federal planning and activity on water.

A recent survey conducted by Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that land disputes are a key threat to peace in Liberia, reports BBC News.

Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the former Soviet Union, called for a global glasnost, or openness, on environmental problems. “This financial turmoil, which will heavily affect the real economy, was absolutely predictable, and it is only one aspect of the wider crisis of all the current development systems,” said Gorbachev. “In fact, there are connected simultaneous crises that are rapidly emerging. These relate to energy, water, food, demography, climate change and the ecosystem devastation.”

The World Health Organization has developed a plan for research on the health impacts of climate change, reports the Science and Development Network.

The end of the Cold War coincided with a decline in the total number of armed conflicts around the world; moreover, according to the UN Peacekeeping Capstone Doctrine, civil conflicts now outnumber interstate wars. These shifts have given rise to a new generation of peace support operations in which environmental issues are playing a growing role. The number of peace support operations launched by non-UN actors—including the EU and NATO—has doubled in the past decade.

The environment can harm deployed personnel through exposure to infectious diseases or environmental contaminants, so preventive measures are typically taken to protect the health of deployed forces. However, because environmental stress caused by climate change might act as a threat multiplier—increasing the need for peace support operations—it is ever more necessary for the international community to conduct crisis management operations in an environmentally sustainable fashion. But can the deployed soldier, police officer, or search-and-rescue worker really act as an environmental steward?

I believe important steps are being taken to ensure the answer to this question is “yes.” The UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations recently drafted environmental protection policies and guidelines for UN field missions and started to implement them through the UN Department of Field Services and the UN Mission in Sudan. Various pilot projects are underway, including an environmental awareness and training program and sustainable base camp activities, such as alternative energy use. These projects are coordinated by the Swedish Defence Research Agency and funded by the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

Within NATO, Environmental Protection Standardization Agreements increase troop-contributing nations’ ability to work together on environmental protection. The NATO Science for Peace and Security Committee is also funding a set of workshops on the “Environmental Aspects of Military Compounds.”

Furthermore, defense organizations in Finland, Sweden, and the United States have cooperated to produce an Environmental Guidebook for Military Operations. The guidebook, which may be used by any nation, reflects a shared commitment to proactively reduce the environmental impacts of military operations and to protect the health and safety of deployed forces.

While the United Nations, NATO, and individual contributing nations are trying to reduce the environmental impact of their peacekeeping operations, the EU is lagging behind. In theory, the EU should find it easy to incorporate environmental considerations into its deployments. Most EU members are also NATO members, so if they can comply with NATO environmental regulations in NATO-led operations, they should be able to do the same with similar EU regulations in EU-led operations. Yet comparable regulations do not exist, even though the EU is often considered environmentally proactive—for instance, in its regulation of chemicals. Therefore, for the EU, it is indeed time to walk the walk—especially in light of its growing contribution to peace support operations, with recent operations conducted in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Chad, and an upcoming intervention slated for Somalia.

Clearly, no single organization can conduct all of the multifaceted tasks required to support and consolidate the processes leading to a sustainable peace; partnerships between military and civilian actors are indispensable to achieving global stability. We must do a better job mainstreaming environmental considerations into foreign policy and into the operations of all stakeholders in post-conflict settings, with the understanding that the fallout from a fragile environment obeys no organizational boundaries. One small step in this direction is an upcoming NATO workshop, “Environmental Security Concerns prior to and during Peace Support and/or Crisis Management Operations.” If militaries continue to contribute to climate change and other forms of environmental degradation, they will be partially to blame when they are called in to defuse or clean up future conflicts over scarce, degraded, or rapidly changing resources.

Annica Waleij is a senior analyst and project manager at the Swedish Defence Research Agency’s Division of Chemical, Biological, Radioactive, and Nuclear Defence and Security. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Swedish Ministry of Defence.