The white roofs cooling women's homes in Indian slums

As India's government promotes organic exports, farmers in Punjab have non-economic reasons for avoiding pesticides: Their health.

Fed up with living in the world's most polluted city, some residents are fighting back, on their rooftops and backyards. In 2010, India launched the Jawarharlal Nehru Solar Mission, a government program to deploy 20,000 megawatts of grid-connected solar power in the country, but much of this push for renewable energy has only been focused on rural areas, leading urban residents to take up local control of their energy supplies.

Daughter, water, trees: A simple strategy to address ecological and gender concerns. Since 2007, villagers in Piplantri have embraced Paliwal's the ethos by planting 111 saplings every time a girl is born.

In the poorest places, the lack of proper clothing costs lives. Now a simple and efficient program in India is attacking the problem with the urgency it deserves.

Warming water has led to the collapse of coral reef systems in the western Indian Ocean, essential to fisheries, protecting shorelines, and reducing beach erosion and sea-level rise. Marine scientists from Nature Seychelles, as part of an international project to protect and restore the reefs, are promoting varieties of coral that they have found to be resistant to the rise in temperature.

New York City black tar roofs cause a number of environmental problems, including air pollution, heat absorption that raises energy consumption, and storm water runoff in the sewer system. Efforts to turn these old roofs into green spaces cool the buildings, enable the containment of more rainfall, reduce sewer discharge, generate energy, and absorb carbon emissions. New York City has a pilot program offering financial help for green roofs.

Although residents turn up their air conditioners, Louisville heat is increasing the city’s death rate by 39 people every year. The city mayor launched a tree commission for planting more trees and since 2011 has planted over 12,000 trees. The canopies from the tree offer cooling shade and bring down the temperature of the city as a whole. The response also includes the installation of green roofs and in-depth research on urban heat islands.

In war zones, people have a difficult time finding clean water and safe areas to inhabit. Social media, smart phones, and technology applications are aiding in people’s survival. In Aleppo, Syria, the International Committee of the Red Cross posted a map on Facebook to show alternative sources of clean drinking water that reached approximately 140,000 people.

In India, 620 million people openly defecate outdoors, causing harm to hygiene, sanitation, food, and water resources. The president of India funded an initiative to build public toilets for the people in his country, but the people did not use them because of traditions and behaviors. The Total Sanitation Campaign is starting to change villagers’ minds by having local leadership persuade those who resist the toilets by holding community activities and creating special committees to maintain the sanitation.

Billions of people around the world lack access to safe sanitation, causing disease and deaths. In Ecuador a foundation developed a cheap, dry, composting toilet for poor rural families.