Photo: Andrew Heavens (flickr)

One of the more critical and less talked about environmental changes occurring right now in several regions of the world, is a developing shortage of water. The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting has partnered with the Common Language Project to send journalists into East Africa in order to report on this growing crisis: According to the Pulitzer Center, "Water scarcity in East Africa is fueling conflict and thwarting development while growing in step with local populations and rising global temperatures."

The blog postings by these journalists, as they learn more about the politics of water in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda, are worth reading, watching and listening to.

Youyouyouyouyou! Shout tiny little kids at our beat-up land rover as it races down the arrow-straight road from Yabello, slowing occasionally for dust devils and herds of annoyed camels.

We’re on our way to Dillo, to report on some of the most extreme water scarcity problems in the country. I’m trying to focus on my notes, all of the interviews and statistics I’ll need to contextualize the interviews we have set up and the long-distance water walk we’ll be participating in the following morning.

Problem is there are too many distractions.

Community Health Workers in Haiti have had one of the most astounding responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in industrialized or developing countries worldwide. When the epidemic first came to Haiti’s shores, many world leaders thought the country was too poor and underdeveloped to make intervention worthwhile. In the decades since, they have been proven wrong. The World Security Institute writes that "Twenty-five years after the AIDS epidemic was given a name, it is a plague with tangled ties between the wealthiest and the poorest countries in the hemisphere. With HIV rates second only to those of sub-Saharan Africa, Caribbean islands that conjure visions of sun, sand, and tourism now highlight the interplay between poverty and the epidemic in this hemisphere."

This short film, In Focus - Haiti's Hope by the Pulitzer Center, showcases what health clinics in rural and urban Haiti are doing, in order to create a sustainable approach to treating disease – and help the Haitian people move out of the world’s most dire poverty level at the same time.

Tobacco Farm. Photo: norsenut (flickr)

One of the most ambitious attempts to control tobacco in the world is being ignored.
The World Health Organization’s tobacco control treaty entered into effect almost exactly three years ago today. It was an unprecedented move by global leaders to target the harmful public health outcome of increased tobacco use, notable especially in the developing world.

According to the World Health Organization, if current trends in the expansion of tobacco use worldwide continue, especially in the developing world where currently half of the deaths due to tobacco occur, “seven out of every ten deaths due to tobacco will occur in the developing world by 2020.”

Three years from the day the treaty went into effect, many countries have made no progress toward minimizing this potential public health disaster, according to the editorial board of the New York Times. "With tobacco use declining in wealthier countries, tobacco companies are spending tens of billions of dollars a year on advertising, marketing and sponsorship, much of it to increase sales in these developing countries." This inundation, as well as the tax revenue governments in developing countries can obtain from tobacco companies, have discouraged many of the countries most crucially affected by tobacco use from pushing any harder to promote the changes of this treaty.

A young coal worker in Shanxi, China. Photo: andi808 (flickr)

Check this out: China has the worst coal mine safety record in the world. Only two months ago, 105 men were killed in one mine. Last year, approximately 3,800 miners were killed in accidents.

Listen as Ted Koppel explores the safety problems surrounding China's coal industry.

China will soon transition from being a net exporter of coal to importing approximately 15 million tons more than it produces. Why? A booming economy, growing at 10 percent a year with every intention of maintaining its rapid speed, and an unusually harsh winter.

The government seems to be feeling pressure both to improve safety records, but also to keep the much demanded coal coming. In the end it seems that the economic concerns trump all.

The BBC is featuring a diary written by a woman living and working in Zimbabwe in which she describes the challenges of living a normal day-to-day life in the face of economic crisis and rampant inflation.

A father and son in Bhutan. Photo: Michael Foley Photography (Flickr)

Wedged between India and China, the tiny country of Bhutan is going through some big changes. These changes began in the early 1970s, when Bhutan’s fourth king slowly started to open up the country to the modern world after centuries of isolation. This modernization and opening of Bhutan is still very much a work in progress; citizens only gained access to television in 1999, and many live hours from the nearest road.

What is especially unique about development in Bhutan, however, is how it is being measured. Instead of focusing on gross domestic product, Bhutan’s monarchy has pursued development in terms of the four pillars of “Gross National Happiness” – equitable and sustainable development, cultural preservation, environmental conservation, and good governance. In many ways, this emphasis on gross national happiness has been a great success. Since 1982, Bhutan’s literacy rate has jumped from 10 percent to 60 percent, its average life expectancy has increased from 43 to 66 years, and its infant mortality rate has dropped from 163 deaths per thousand to 40.

What remains to be seen, however, is how Bhutan's current transition to democracy will affect the country's development. While voter turnout in the March 24 parliamentary election was over 80 percent, there appeared to be few differences between the two main political parties, both of which pledged to continue to carry out the king's concept of gross national happiness.