for many years, the prevailing notion of security has been associated with the ‘realist’ militaryside of conflict management, understood as ‘national security’. for us the term does not just mean theinterplay of deterring, compelling, defensive and offensive force in the pursuit of a self-defined nationalinterest. above all, and at a fundamental level it includes the safety and quality of life ...

Protected areas are leading tools in efforts to slow global species loss and appear also to have a role in climate change policy. Understanding their impacts on deforestation informs environmental policies. We review several approaches to evaluating protection's impact on deforestation, given three hurdles to empirical evaluation, and note that "matching" techniques from economic impact evaluat...

Although public debate in Canada about climate change and air pollution is louder than ever, the state of the environment remains a relatively neglected determinant of health, and environmental public health infrastructure and programs are poorly developed. Health Canada has only recently begun to develop a national environmental public health tracking or surveillance system. The authors review...

Small island states are likely the countries most vulnerable to climate variability and longterm climate change. Climate models suggest that small island states will experience warmer temperatures and changes in rainfall, soil moisture budgets, prevailing winds (speed and direction), and patterns of wave action. El Niño events likely will strengthen shortterm and interannual climate variations....

Pakistan is seriously confronted by many complex and difficult environmental challenges related to air, water, soil, forests and food including issues such as climate change. The close link between environment and health is neither well understood nor appreciated. The annual cost of environmental degradation in Pakistan has been estimated to be around US $4.0 billion orat least 6% of the countr...

Proponents of urban agriculture have identified its potential to improve health and the environment but in New York City and other densely developed and populated urban areas, it faces huge challenges because of the shortage of space, cost of land, and the lack of contemporary local food production. However, large portions of the city and metropolitan region do have open land and a history of a...

Saharan mineral dust exported over the tropical North Atlantic is thought to have significant impacts on regional climate and ecosystems, but limited data exist documenting past changes in long-range dust transport. This data gap limits investigations of the role of Saharan dust in past climate change, in particular during the mid-Holocene, when climate models consistently underestimate the int...