This publication examines people, politics and the environment and their relation to drinking water supplies in rural areas. Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) has become a well-established developmental sector into which domestic water naturally falls. However, efforts to improve rural water supply services may benefit from more inter-disciplinary collaboration.

Comprehensive yet concise report outlining the key challenges and projected demands in the global agricultural sector, from an energy-water-food nexus perspective.

The domestic water sector has focused for many years on benefiting health by improving supply. Can more and better water improve people’s health? Does improved water supply by government and agencies really meet the basic needs of the poor? Or should water be treated as an economic good?

Joint report from Forest Watch Indonesia, World Resources Institute and Global Forest Watch. It provides a detailed analysis of the scale and pace of change affecting Indonesia’s forests. The report concludes that the doubling of deforestation rates in Indonesia is largely the result of a corrupt political and economic system that regards natural resources as a source of revenue to be exploited for political ends and personal gain.

Overproduction of coffee and low coffee prices have resulted in a global crisis affecting the people and biodiversity of many tropical countries. The authors, from the Wildlife Conservation Society in Indonesia, describe expanding production of low-quality robusta coffee, which contributes to low prices and lowland deforestation, but is not improving the livelihood of local farmers.

This report documents the environmental and social impacts of Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), assesses the role of international financial institutions in fuelling APP’s unsustainable and damaging operations and examines the link between this unsustainable practice and APP's financial crisis.Financial institutions should acknowledge that it is far more than the financial failure of APP that proves that they seriously underestimated the risk in financing the company.

Each year, tens of thousands of people in Bangladesh are internally displaced as a consequence of riverbank erosion. Yet, such erosion does not draw the attention of policy makers in the same way that other natural disasters do and as a result, a number of coping mechanisms are employed by those affected, with the burden of displacement largely falling on women. This brief argues that instead of attempting to alter the course of nature, it is time to address the institutional mechanisms needed to help affected people cope with displacement and their material and social loss.

This paper looks at the water policy of Tanzania, and makes comparisons with the situation in Kenya. It focuses especially on recent attempts to move towards a participatory, demand-management approach to rural water supply.

How have Latin American countries been using Environmental Impact Assessments in order to build more sustainable extractive industries? A focus on Peru provides some interesting lessons.

Is it possible to develop extractive industries while preserving the environment? Several Latin American countries have been attempting to improve the environmental sustainability of their extractive industry sectors by developing their legal frameworks, in particular through the use and adaptation of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) tool.