Of all the Millennium Development Goals, the maternal health and sanitation targets are among the farthest off track, said Rebecca Fishman, operations and special projects director of WASH Advocates. [Video Below]

What are the environmental implications of changing household sizes? A recent article by Mason Bradbury, M. Nils Peterson, and Jianguo Liu, published in Population and Environment, analyzes data from 213 countries over 400 years and finds the average number of occupants per home tends to decline as population grows. This dynamic, they write, indicates that accommodating housing could prove to be one of “the greatest environmental challenges of the twenty-first century.” As countries develop and urbanize, “according to convergence theory, household size decreases (often from greater than five to less than three).” Other cultural shifts, like increasing divorce rates, urban sprawl driven by rising affluence, decreasing numbers of multigenerational households, and larger houses (in the United States, homes more than doubled in size between 1950 and 2002, according to the article) compound the issue. As population growth continues in parts of the world, these trends pose critical questions for conservation and environmental sustainability, since “households are the end consumers of most natural resources and ecosystem services.”

“If there was a perfect slum, Kibera would be it.” The notoriously overcrowded and underserved settlement in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi captivates the public imagination, engendering visions of urban violence, poverty, and hopelessness, said Caroline Wanjiku Kihato of the University of the Witwatersrand at the Wilson Center on February 18. The area was ravaged by ethnic violence that erupted across the country following Kenya’s disputed 2007 elections, pitting neighbor against neighbor in tribal clashes that killed more than 1,000 people, displaced many thousands more, and provoked an alarming surge in sexual violence.

Nearly every local story has a global context. This is especially true when it comes to the environment, and there may be no better way to show that context than through visualization. But in developing countries, where so many important changes are happening, journalists often lack the resources or skills to make data visualization a part of their repertoire.

The past three years – and more pointedly the past 12 months – have laid witness to monumental, if not heartbreaking, incidents of gender-based violence. The gang rape of a 23-year-old woman in New Delhi last December; the gang rape of a 16-year-old girl left for dead in a pit latrine in Western Kenya last June; the mass sexual assault of women in Tahrir Square during the 2011 revolution in Egypt and since; all were high profile atrocities that ignited outrage around the world.

The original version of this article, by Laura Robson and Caroline Savitzky, appeared on Blue Ventures’ Beyond Conservation blog.

The excitement was palpable as we gathered with almost 200 of the world’s finest population-health-environment (PHE) practitioners, researchers, and advocates in Addis Ababa for the International PHE Conference earlier last month! With all of us working on integrated projects encompassing family planning, community health, sustainable livelihoods, and environmental initiatives, there were many ideas and progress updates to be shared.

The people of northern Kenya currently face many daily hardships. Primarily pastoralists by livelihood, their cycle of life focuses on the basics – securing food and water for family and livestock, constructing shelter from the unforgiving sun, and finding sustenance when periodic droughts ravage the region. A 2011 drought affected millions of people, and tens of thousands of livestock died. Approximately 90 percent of the area’s population lives below the poverty line.