The Global Maternal Newborn Health Conference, held in Mexico City from October 18-21, will provide a forum to identify, understand, and respond to the most urgent health needs of mothers and newborns. The hope is that it will accelerate momentum for maternal and newborn health in the newly adopted Sustainable Development Goals and put us on a track to end all preventable maternal and newborn deaths.

Food security and proper nutrition are essential elements for the good health and wellbeing of individuals and communities. Proper nutrition increases productivity and subsequently helps lift families out of poverty. However, an estimated 800 million people are chronically malnourished across the world. Globally, more than 3 million children die each year due to illnesses caused by malnutrition.

When war breaks out, what happens to the weather forecast? Violent conflict disrupts many essential services in developing countries and one of the most overlooked is meteorology, which has surprisingly big consequences for farmers, policymakers, and the aid workers who are there to help.

Scenario planning has a long history – the RAND Corporation employed it heavily in planning for potential U.S. responses to nuclear war and 16^th century Spanish Jesuit theologians pointed to the idea as proof of free will – but in many respects this powerful set of methodological tools for managing complexity and uncertainty remains underused, especially beyond the defense, intelligence, and business communities.

Many have noted inequality as fuel for conflict. It can serve to exacerbate grievances amongst those who have less within unequal contexts, which can in turn serve as a mobilizing factor in fueling violence. Alternatively, it can make the “prize” of conflict larger – within the most unequal societies, the poor have less to lose and more to gain.

More than 80 percent of the estimated 42 million people living in Central Africa’s Lake Victoria Basin depend on fishing or farming for survival. Given this overwhelming reliance on natural resources, the lake’s deteriorating condition – driven by climate change, agriculture, pollution, deforestation, overfishing, and industrialization – has far-reaching implications.

Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos and the richest woman in Africa, owes her wealth to the oil industry. Delfina Fernandes, a woman living in abject poverty in the village of Kibanga, uses gasoline as an anesthetic to dull the sheering pain of her rotting teeth.

Given that there have been three major peace processes in Sudan’s troubled western province of Darfur, the current escalation of violence indicates that perhaps something about existing approaches is failing to hit the mark. Identifying what is missing is vital – not just for Darfur, but for other areas with similar challenges of state fragility, poverty, and competition over natural resources.