Small towns play a significant role in the economic growth and urbanization of China, attracting migrants from rural areas and other urban centres.

We're in the midst of a biodiversity crisis. For those of us in the North, that can seem abstract; for the rural poor in the  developing world, it's all too real.

The purpose of this paper is to add to a deeper appreciation of the context, milestones, processes, learning and emerging directions of the HPFPI in its thrust to mobilize communities in finding and driving their solutions to disasters.

The provision of water and sanitation services in deprived urban settlements is a challenge faced by many countries in the South. The growth of towns and cities together with the rapid increase in urban populations has meant that peri-urban areas are growing much more quickly than formal urban centres.

An estimated 800 million urban dwellers lack access to safe and adequate drinking water. Most of those people live in unplanned, low-income areas and slums.

More than twenty years have passed since community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) rose to prominence in different parts of Africa as a strategy for rural development, local empowerment, and conservation.  Led by new ideas about the merits of decentralized, collective resource governance regimes, and creative field experiments such as Zimbabwe’s CAMPFIRE, these community-based approaches evolved in a wide range of ecological, political, and social contexts across Africa.

One of the important challenges of post-war reconstruction is to provide more and better quality basic services, such as water. Previous attempts at upgrading main supply systems to accommodate peri-urban areas have been overwhelmed by the explosive demographic growth of Angola’s major cities brought about by many years of civil war.

This paper assesses the quality and extent of provision for water and sanitation in urban areas in Malawi – where over 60% of the population lives in informal settlements. It also considers whether the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for water and sanitation are likely to be met in Malawi, and examines the current and potential role of community-led sanitation improvements. It includes recommendations for interventions needed by governmental, international and civil-society organizations to improve living conditions of communities to contribute to the realization of the MDGs.

This report explores how international oil and gas companies can contribute to tackling energy poverty in the regions where they operate. Successful initiatives need to be developed in partnership with other actors (government, donors, international NGO’s, researchers and civil society). Energy poverty cannot be addressed in isolation from other development challenges, including general poverty alleviation; provision of clean water; agricultural development; and the provision of education and health services. A case study on Nigeria highlights the dilemmas facing some countries

Food security, energy concerns and the potential impacts of climate change (including floods and droughts) have brought dams back to the forefront of the development agenda. This report reviews the experience with displacement of affected people in West Africa over the last 40 years and examines mechanisms for distributing the benefits of dams more equitably and ensuring that affected people are better off.

The recent spike in food prices has led to a renewal of interest in agricultural issues and in the long-term drivers of food prices. Urbanization has been mentioned as one possible cause of higher food prices.

Rapid increases in food prices in 2007 and the first half of 2008 attracted high-level policy attention. During the course of 2008, the United Nations organized an inter-agency High-Level Taskforce on the Global Food Security Crisis and issued a Comprehensive Framework for Action.