“Sixty-percent of Filipinos live in the coastal areas,” said Joan Castro, executive vice president of PATH Foundation Philippines, Inc., in an interview with ECSP, and dwindling fish stocks are an issue across the archipelago. “With increasing population, the food that goes on the table for a lot of families in these coastal communities was an issue, so food security was the theme of the IPOPCORM project.”

“It’s really important to link the integrated PHE approach with the policies and strategies of the country,” says Annie Wallace, who worked as a PHE technical advisor with USAID’s Global Health Fellows Program in Ethiopia. “Because if you don’t have political buy-in from the decision-makers and the leaders, then it’s going to be really difficult to justify the allocation of different funds for these projects to be expanded to other regions, or expanded in scale, or even to expand outside of the country.”

This PHE Champion profile was produced by the BALANCED Project.

“Now, people can plan their families and know how to use a condom,” says Abdalah Masingano as he proudly tells how his community has come to accept integrated population, health, and environment (PHE) activities.

For 10 years, I have been working on marine conservation in Tanzania with the University of Rhode Island’s Coastal Resources Center. As part of that effort, I’ve helped forge links between HIV/AIDS prevention in vulnerable fishing communities and marine conservation. However, family planning and reproductive health (FP/RH) were relatively new to me. But a recent study tour of an integrated Population, Health, and Environment (PHE) program in the Philippines helped me understand that combining family planning services and marine conservation can help reduce overfishing and improve food security.

Celebrating World Health Day, the World Health Organization, with its partners around the globe, today launched an initiative for healthly lives in urban settings, through the theme “1000 Cities, 1000 Lives.” “We are at a critical turning point in history where we can make a difference,” said Dr Ala Alwan, assistant director-general for noncommunicable diseases and mental health.

Since the first World Health Day 60 years ago, the world has seen a dramatic rural exodus. Today, more people live in urban areas than anywhere else. Providing healthy livelihoods for the urban poor is a challenge, as poverty-stricken urban centers face a number of health obstacles, from high child mortality rates, environmental pollution, and widespread disease, to a lack of access to basic water, sanitation, and health care.

“In general, urban populations are better off than their rural counterparts,” said WHO Director-General Margaret Chan. “They tend to have greater access to social and health services and their life expectancy is longer. But cities can also concentrate threats to health such as inadequate sanitation and refuse collection, pollution, road traffic accidents, outbreaks of infectious diseases and also unhealthy lifestyles.”

The 1000 Cities campaign hopes to encourage all cities to promote healthy activities during the week following World Health Day (4/7-4/11). Through a new website, the WHO is collecting profiles and pictures in an easy-to-navigate map. Notable activities include HIV/AIDS-awareness flashmobs, skateboarding and cycling competitions, car-free days, outdoor sports events, and dance performances,  in cities as diverse as Mandalgobi, Mongolia; Bangalore, India; and Luanda, Angola.

The Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and its Comparative Urban Studies Program have collaborated on urbanization events and publications that examine the strong and critical connections between healthy urban populations and environmental sustainability.

With proper attention paid to delivering population, health, and environmental services in our urban centers, it may be possible to leverage the benefits of higher urban densities—such as lower aid dispersion costs, communication access, infrastructure services, and fertile environments for ideas and productivity—to ensure urban sustainability for the future.

“We journalists tend to deal with the immediate crisis,” Tim Wheeler, an environmental reporter with the Baltimore Sun, told an October gathering of the Society of Environmental Journalists in Madison, Wisconsin. Because the effects of population growth largely won’t be felt until the future, the subject is challenging for journalists who, as a whole, “tend not to look down the road too far.” MORE

There are two things we know for sure in Washington these days: First, the incoming Obama administration is likely to bring change on a wide variety of topics; and second, U.S. foreign assistance is in dire need of a change. You are probably already aware of the plethora of policy papers on how the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Department of State should be reorganized to increase their effectiveness. There are also multiple initiatives striving to boost the prominence of neglected issues like water. What is lacking is an integrated strategy addressing both our domestic and international goals that would in turn suggest organizational reforms for the federal government.

As you read this, the Obama transition team is planning how to tackle major international challenges, including the financial crisis, energy supply, climate change, food security, global health threats, institution-building and governance, and global poverty. International development, as part of an integrated strategic plan, is an important part of the solution to all of these issues. Unfortunately, the current system is dysfunctional. Existing development capacities are spread throughout the executive branch—across 12 government departments, 25 government agencies, and almost 60 government offices—and, in some cases, are outsourced to the private sector. No one person or office is charged with priority-setting, planning, budgeting, implementation, or evaluation.

Wilson Center Senior Scholar John Sewell and I spent this past spring meeting with a group of experts with a wide range of expertise to develop a memo that sets out how such a strategy should be developed and implemented. In A Memo to the Next President: Promoting American Interests Through Smarter, More Strategic Global Policies, we recommend the appointment of a high-level individual on the president’s staff to develop, implement, and monitor—in consultation with key members of Congress—a government-wide strategy to promote U.S. interests abroad. At some point, larger organizational questions will need to be addressed, but the first step toward effectively tackling these challenges is creating an overall strategy to meet the country’s goals and priorities.

Clearly, the sort of integrated planning we are recommending has great relevance for many of the topics discussed here on the New Security Beat. Whether we are talking about climate change as a national security threat or the relationship between conservation efforts and population, there is a need for a broader understanding of how these issues—and their potential solutions—affect one another. With dramatic changes in the White House and Congress and with a broad consensus that U.S. foreign policy efforts are insufficient, the time is ripe for an overhaul in our strategies.

To read more about reforming U.S. foreign assistance, check out these blogs:

• Center for Strategic and International Studies: Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project
  
• Global Development: Views from the Center
  
• Chasing the Flame: Building a Movement for a Smarter U.S. Foreign Policy

In the new video “Water Wars or Water Woes? Water Management as Conflict Management,” Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP) Director Geoff Dabelko explains that although newspapers and politicians constantly warn of impending “water wars,” water rarely leads to interstate violence. By focusing on “water wars” – which evidence shows are extremely rare – we “are missing a lot of what is important around conflict management around water,” argues Dabelko.