Articles

Despite the increased attention the sixth Sustainable Development Goal (clean water and sanitation) has brought, access to water in Sub-Saharan Africa is worse than ever: there are more people without access to water now than there were in 1990. In order to fix the problem we need to understand what’s going wrong with our current approaches. That was the aim of an Atlas Award-winning study published in Water Resources and Rural Development, by researchers at Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland, the University of Malawi in Malawi and the University of Lusaka in Zambia. Interestingly enough, since women and school aged girls are typically tasked with water fetching, by providing water access and sanitation authors feel there is an effect on others SDG like SDG 10 (reduced inequalities), SDG 4 (quality education) and SDG 5 (gender equality)

Natural World Heritage Sites (NWHS), via their formal designation through the United Nations, are globally recognized as containing some of the Earth's most valuable natural assets. Understanding changes in their ecological condition is essential for their ongoing preservation. Here we use two newly available globally consistent data sets that assess changes in human pressure (Human Footprint) and forest loss (Global Forest Watch) over time across the global network of terrestrial NWHS.

Massive slums have become major features of cities in many low-income and middle-income countries. Here, in the first in a Series of two papers, we discuss why slums are unhealthy places with especially high risks of infection and injury. We show that children are especially vulnerable, and that the combination of malnutrition and recurrent diarrhoea leads to stunted growth and longer-term effects on cognitive development. We find that the scientific literature on slum health is underdeveloped in comparison to urban health, and poverty and health.