Last week the Chinese government temporarily forced millions of Beijing motorists off the road in an effort designed to help clear the city's notoriously polluted air. The four-day initiative was a pilot program for a similar car ban that officials plan to implement during the 2008 Summer Olympics being held in Beijing. After decades of rapid economic growth, air pollution has become a serious environmental health problem in the country, and Chinese leaders are determined to clean Beijing's skies in preparation for its turn as Olympic host.

This week, in a closely-watched case, an Indian court ruled that the country's gigantic pharmaceutical industry may continue producing cheap generic drugs for diseases like HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. The case stemmed from the Indian Government's rejection of a patent application submitted by the pharmaceutical company Novartis for its new leukemia drug, Gleevec.

Monday's decision is a major development in the ongoing and often contentious debate over pharmaceutical patents and their impact on access to essential medicines, which has pitted aid agencies and developing countries against large drug companies and the governments of high-income nations.

The ruling is particularly important because Indian generic pharmaceutical companies are not only major domestic suppliers, but also provide cheap medicines to many countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Images depicting nature (and humans' impact on it) have long been valued as highly effective means to raise environmental consciousness and convey complex environmental concepts. For example, the Apollo 8 mission's famous photo of the Earth rising over the moon's horizon is often credited with helping nurture the rise of modern environmentalism.

Today, the growing use of online, interactive maps that help visualize, contextualize and disseminate complex environmental data could have similarly profound effects on the way we understand our relationship with the natural world.

Until recently, most research and policy initiatives related to climate change have focused on ways in which societies can reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and prevent the worst effects of global warming. Current scientific evidence shows, however, that some human-induced climate change is now inevitable and is in fact already occurring. The question of which regions and groups are most vulnerable to this predicted climate flux and how they might adapt to it has thus become an important area of research, funding, and policymaking.

Until recently, international migration was rarely associated with outcomes like improved gender equality, lower fertility rates, or increased entrepreneurship in the countries migrants left behind. Instead, migration was viewed as the necessary but unfortunate response to economic crises, environmental collapse or political turmoil in the home country.

However, a growing body of literature, including a new book released yesterday, argues that instead of seeing migration as a "development failure," policymakers should treat it as a powerful policy tool for improving economic, environmental, social and political conditions in both rich and poor countries.

According to a report released yesterday by the World Bank Institute, over $1 trillion in bribes are paid around the world each year. This bribery combines with other forms of corruption and poor governance to create a host of development problems -- including increased infant mortality, reduced incomes, and decreased aid effectiveness -- which tend to disproportionately burden the poor.

A recent report from the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) has concluded that past and present conflicts in Sudan are linked to the serious environmental degradation that has occurred in the country over the last several decades. The report's findings, along with its subsequent calls for increased spending on environmental management and sustainable development, highlight growing concerns that ecological collapse could trigger social breakdowns in regions across the globe.

Last week, the United Nation's Population Fund (UNFPA) released their "State of the World Population 2007" report. This year's edition of the annual publication, entitled "Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth," addresses urbanization and its impact on global society. Appropriately, the report arrives as humanity nears the date when, for the first time in history, more humans will be living in cities than in rural areas. The authors present this watershed event, which demographers predict will occur sometime in 2008, as the most important trend in human development.

On June 21, 2007, the Center for Global Development (CDG) hosted a panel discussion on China's rapidly growing influence in Africa. The panel featured David Dollar, the World Bank's Country Director for China and Mongolia and Callisto Madavo, a former World Bank economist specializing in Africa and East Asia, and currently a professor of African Studies at Georgetown University.

Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) released a new study detailing the effects of the environment on public health. According to the report, over 13 million preventable deaths occur annually as a result of unhealthy living and working conditions.

While the link between the environment and human well-being has long been recognized, the connection is often difficult to measure. WHO hopes that this study will be a first step in quantifying, on a country-by-country basis, environmental effects on health. These data, in turn, should provide policymakers and health officials the foundation they need to begin reducing environment-related death rates.