Q & A Archive

Haiti was already mired in a deep political crisis and humanitarian emergency before a 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck earlier this month, killing at least 2,200 people and injuring and displacing thousands more. The country’s acting president and prime minister, Ariel Henry, had been in office for less than a month when the disaster occurred, having assumed power in the wake of the assassination of President Jovenel Moise on July 7. Moise had been facing mass protests and widespread demands for his resignation due to rampant corruption and mismanagement of the economy under his administration. Amid the turmoil, a coalition of Haitian […]

Data released earlier this year showed that South Korea’s fertility rate is now the world’s lowest, at 0.84 births per woman in 2020, contributing to the country’s first-ever population decline. Other major powers in the region—including China and Japan, the world’s No. 2 and No. 3 economies, respectively—also have rapidly graying populations.  On the Trend Lines podcast this week, Ronald D. Lee, a demographer and economist at the University of California, Berkeley, joined WPR’s Elliot Waldman to discuss the implications of East Asia’s demographic transition, and what policies can be implemented to address it.  Listen to the full conversation here: […]

According to a United Nations report released last month, just under one-tenth of the global population was undernourished in 2020, up from 8.4 percent in 2019. Much of that spike was due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has severely strained global food systems that were already under pressure due to climate change, population growth, conflict and migration. On the Trend Lines podcast this week, Julie Howard, a senior adviser to the global food security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, joined WPR’s Elliot Waldman to discuss the U.N. report’s findings. Listen to the full conversation here: If you like […]

2020 will forever be known as the plague year, but it was also a year of increased hunger around the world. That’s according to a multiagency United Nations report released last month, which found that the number of undernourished people in the world rose by 118 million, to a total of about 768 million—nearly one-tenth of the global population. Much of that increase was due to COVID-19, a crisis that “continues to expose weaknesses in our food systems,” the report warned. Today on Trend Lines, Julie Howard, a senior adviser to the global food security program at the Center for […]

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is only one of many pathogens that originated among animals before spreading to humans. In fact, scientists are discovering more of these types of pathogens every year, largely as a result of global climate change and habitat destruction caused by humans. Deborah Kochevar is the director of a project called STOP Spillover, which aims to better understand and prevent the spread of zoonotic diseases among humans. She joined WPR’s Elliot Waldman on the Trend Lines podcast this week to discuss her work. Listen to the full conversation here: If you like what you hear, […]

In recent decades, scientists have identified dozens of new, potentially deadly pathogens that originated among other animal species but have the capacity to infect humans. SARS-COV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is one such zoonotic virus, and humankind’s vulnerability to them is increasing as a result of population growth, globalization, climate change and other processes. A recently launched project called STOP Spillover aims to anticipate and address the threats posed by zoonotic pathogens. This week on Trend Lines, the director of STOP Spillover, Deborah Kochevar, joins WPR’s Elliot Waldman to discuss some of the latest interventions that are being devised […]