Health in Focus for World Water Day 2001
March 22 marks World Water Day 2001, an initiative stemming from the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro. That year, the UN General Assembly called for raising awareness about water and its threatened state on this date every year. "Water and Health" is the theme for 2001, and the World Health Organization (WHO) is the lead UN agency for the day this year. (March 2001)

Declaring War on POPs
Negotiators from 122 countries who met late last year to address persistent organic pollutants took their job seriously. The treaty they drafted amounts to a declaration of war on POPs. (Population Today, February/March 2001)

Africa's Struggle with Desertification
Desertification (advanced land degradation) is most severe in Africa. Three-quarters of the continent's drylands that are used for agriculture have already begun to lose productivity. (February 2001)

What's Behind Desertification?
Desertification is generally viewed as an advanced stage of land degradation. While people have managed fragile drylands successfully for millennia in many parts of the world, pressure upon the land is much greater today as roughly 2 billion people inhabit drylands around the world. (February 2001)

Desertification Convention Inches Toward Implementation
Last December, diplomats and conservationists took aim at an environmental problem that has quietly come to afflict more than 110 countries: desertification. Meeting in Bonn, Germany from December 11–22, 2000, delegates from 170 countries discussed ways to turn the good intentions of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (CCD) into concrete action to arrest the problem. (February 2001)

Environmental Security: PRB Talks With Thomas Homer-Dixon
In an interview, Thomas Homer-Dixon, director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Toronto, talked about his model of the relationship between the scarcity of renewable resources such as water and soil and the outbreak of violent conflict within countries. (January 2001)

Environmental Scarcity and the Outbreak of Conflict
How can environmental problems contribute to civil unrest and violence? The connection is a complicated one, involving several steps and processes. The research led by Thomas Homer-Dixon at the University of Toronto has focused on how environmental scarcity leads to certain destabilizing social effects that make violence more likely. (January 2001)

Climate Change Talks Heating Up in The Hague
On Nov. 13, 2000, hundreds of people from around the world began two weeks of talks on greenhouse gases and climate change. (November 2000)

Population and Climate Change
International negotiations aimed at ameliorating climate change have generally focused on consumption patterns in industrialized countries rather than global population growth. The developing world is fast becoming a substantial contributor to climate change, however. (November 2000)

Greenhouse Gases and Climate Change
Over the past two centuries, all kinds of human activities, from powering steam engines to surfing the World Wide Web, have added to the "greenhouse" effect. (November 2000)