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In the aftermath of Haiti’s 7.0 earthquake, the world turned its attention to the impoverished and devastated island nation (including the New Security Beat, which covered some its demographic problems). Reporters, relief workers, and volunteers from around the globe rushed to provide coverage and aide. Western leaders announced bold blueprints for building a “new Haiti.” Six months later, only a tiny portion of pledged funds have been delivered, over one million Haitians remain homeless, and much of the country’s infrastructure remains in ruins. This week on dialogue, host John Milewski speaks with Donna Leinwand of USA Today and Sheri Fink, Public Policy Scholar at the Wilson Center, on their experiences working and reporting in Haiti after the devastation. Scheduled for broadcast starting July 21st, 2010 on MHz Worldview channel.

“Copenhagen was many things to many people,” said Chatham House’s Cleo Paskal, in a video interview with the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program, but “what was very clear was that India, specifically, was playing quite a strong, clear role in deciding how alignments would be working.” We spoke to Paskal following her presentation at a recent Wilson Center event.

We must do more than simply take our current understanding of climate-change risk and extrapolate it into the future, asserted Chad Briggs of the Berlin-based Adelphi Research in a video interview with the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program.

If we were to actually use less fossil fuel, what would happen to today’s petrostates? “If the oil revenues dry up or even decline a little bit you might have a real serious crisis,” said Stacy VanDeveer of the University of New Hampshire, during an interview with ECSP. We spoke to VanDeveer following his presentation at the Wilson Center event, “Backdraft: The Conflict Potential of Climate Mitigation and Adaptation.”

What about climate change will impact us? That’s the question the Navy’s Task Force Climate Change is trying to answer. Rear Admiral David Titley explains the task force’s objectives in this interview by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) at their recent “Climate Change and National Security” event on the Hill.

The European Union’s biofuel goal for 2020 “is a good example of setting a target…without really thinking through [the] secondary, third, or fourth order consequences,” said Alexander Carius, co-founder and managing director of Adelphi Research and Adelphi Consult. While the 2007-2008 global food crisis demonstrated that the growth of crops for fuels has “tremendous effects” in the developing world, analysis of these threats are underdeveloped and are not incorporated into climate change policies, he said. [Video Below]

“I’m trying to build common ground between environmentalists and economists. Those two groups are being cat and dog for a long time,” author and Oxford professor Paul Collier, speaking about his new book The Plundered Planet, tells ECSP.

Collier says the interests of the two groups have thus far been dominated by their “fundamentalist” wings: On one side the environmental “romantics,” who value nature over people, and on the other the economic “ostriches,” who deny that nature’s a priori existence endows it with unique characteristics.

Work toward resolving two of the world’s most pressing challenges, environmental degradation and poverty, demands collaboration and mutual recognition by both sides. “If you take that romantic view of nature,” says Collier, “we will never feed a world of 9 billion people–we will never lift the poorest people out of poverty.” At the same time, nature does not belong exclusively to those living today, and its value must be preserved for future generations. “Those rights of the future have to be respected,” he says.

“The romantics and the ostriches, between them at the moment, are winning,” says Collier. “[I]t’s very important they start to lose.”

“Displaced people are like every other human being, they want, they need the advantage of family planning. They are asking only for services to be available for them, affordable for them, and acceptable for them,” said Dr. Grace Kodindo in a recent interview with ECSP about the challenges of family planning in conflict regions. The OB/GYN from Chad calls for family planning services to be included in the provisions made for displaced and refugee communities.

Kodindo identified five key barriers to family planning for displaced people, including a lack of coherent policies for displaced people in host countries and a lack of awareness and attention by donors to family planning. Other barriers include the lack of access in remote areas, and a lack of knowledge and therefore demand.

However, in many cases family planning services are very much in demand. One refugee mother compared herself to a “hen being followed by many chicks,” said Kodindo, who “ask[s] the government and the donors to give and to make policy that can really facilitate the provision of services and to provide funding so that services can be available to all these people.”

Kodindo, who recently spoke at a Wilson Center panel on “Family Planning in Fragile States,” is also speaking in DC on Thursday, June 3 at a showing of the documentary about her work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Grace Under Fire.