It’s said that practice makes perfect, and that saying couldn’t be truer than for health care workers trying to save newborn lives in low-income settings. Without frequent retraining and refresher workshops, such skills deteriorate over time. The need for these workshops is especially strong in Ethiopia, where the infant mortality rate is 77.12 deaths per 1,000 babies, placing it among the worst worldwide.
Approximately one in eight children dies before the age of 5 in sub-Saharan Africa – a rate that has been declining, but is still nearly 20 times higher than in developed nations. A new Lancet study out this week suggests that the multiple interventions applied in the Millennium Villages Project are having a significant impact, [...]
The Africa Soil Information Service has upgraded its website with a new layout, easier navigation and updates on project activities. A growing set of features provides information for managing soil and land in Africa, including an interactive map tool that allows you to choose layers and areas of interest that can be downloaded.
As the world population grows toward 10 billion, consumption of water, food and energy is expanding at a rate that cannot be maintained without depleting the planet’s resources. If we fail to address these two issues together, we face a grim future of economic, social and environmental ills, warns a new report prepared by a group of scientists and other experts for the Royal Society.
It is a unique challenge of our generation that many in the developing world have cellular phones and TVs, but lack reliable access to water. Odd, perhaps, given that water is marketed as essential for life, a human right, and heart rending pictures of women and children walking miles to fetch water are routinely flashed to tug at everyone’s heart strings.
“Thank you for coming on this gorgeous day, to sit in an airless, lightless room and discuss how to save the world,” said John Mutter, director of Columbia’s PhD in Sustainable Development and a member of the Earth Institute faculty, in welcoming the audience of the Sustainable Development Seminar, “The Population Bomb: Defused or Still Ticking?” The seminar brought together a panel of demography and population experts, who, Mutter calculated, shared a total of 121 years’ experience in the field. It became apparent, upon the beginning of the discussion, that the population bomb was not so much ticking, as exploding. The current world population, which is estimated to be 7 billion, is projected to reach 10.2 billion by 2100.
There is much to celebrate, this International Women’s Day. Three fabulously courageous women won last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, and just a year earlier the United Nations established UN Women, a new agency dedicated to gender equality worldwide and headed by another strong woman leader and role model, former President of Brazil Michelle Bachelet. School enrollments of girls are unprecedentedly high, the world has finally begun to mobilize around safe childbirth and other women’s health issues, and the World Bank is reporting this week that we have achieved the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG), halving extreme poverty, well before the United Nations’ 2015 deadline, thereby easing the lives of hundreds of millions worldwide. Yet a tremendous amount of work waits to be done.
Can we manage the needs of 9 billion people for water, food and energy without depleting our resources and ruining the environment? “The solutions,” says Tim Fox, “are all within the capability of existing technology.”
The United States and five other countries agreed this week to fund an effort to cut emissions of methane, soot and other pollutants to start to slow the rate of human-induced climate change.
When push came to shove, it was a microscopic virus that would draw the frontiers of a nation, and help to decide the life and livelihood of millions upon millions of the Americans who came to live there.
State of the Planet is a forum for discussion on varying viewpoints. The opinions expressed by the authors and those providing comments are theirs alone, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Earth Institute or Columbia University.
