Between 2010 and 2015, Tanzania received more than $320 million in assistance via the U.S. government’s Feed the Future Initiative – the most of any country. But despite these commitments and an average of six to seven percent annual economic growth since 2000, Tanzania did not meet the first Millennium Development Goal: to reduce hunger and extreme poverty by half by the end of 2015.

Surrounded by water, the Philippines is especially vulnerable to climate change. Its islands and its people are enduring increasingly unpredictable rains, intensifying cycles of flood and drought, and strengthening storms forming in the Pacific. These changing weather patterns have not only derailed livelihoods and agricultural productivity in rural areas, they have also worsened water insecurity in cities, where 45 percent of the population live.

In January, over the objections of indigenous groups that live there, the government of Ecuador sold oil exploration rights to 500,000 acres of the Amazon to a consortium of Chinese companies. Whenever we hear about stories like this, there is a tendency to think: How can this happen? How can obscenely rich investors run roughshod over the land, livelihoods, and rights of impoverished local communities, and with utterly no consequences?

How will climate change affect you? Probably through water.

That’s the major message of a new World Bank report that finds the ways governments treat water can have a profound effect on the economy.

The Middle East, as much as ever, is the focus of international attention, but the obvious crises may be a distraction from deeper underlying issues.

Last October, on the heels of the UN General Assembly agreeing to the Sustainable Development Goals, the global health community met in Mexico City to discuss strategy for achieving the “grand convergence”: finally bridging the gap between maternal and newborn health in rich and poor countries. [Video Below]

The environment has long been a factor in violent conflict in South Sudan, especially with respect to control over oil. The first oil was discovered in 1999, and by 2007, hydrocarbons accounted for over 95 percent of Sudan’s income. South Sudan became independent in 2011 after years of war with the Sudanese government in Khartoum, intensified by local conflicts over access to oil-rich border areas. But beyond conflict, South Sudanese communities have also been ringing the alarm bell about pollution and health hazards caused by the oil industry.