The environmental community has an opportunity to create and leverage partnerships with the development community on social issues, rather than trying to develop new expertise of its own.

When a child is starving, a family may not be able to think about long-term sustainability or damage to ecosystems that support endangered species.

No matter how you measure it, women and girls bear the brunt of poverty. But it's also clear that women are also our greatest hope for ending it. We at CARE have long believed that if you change the life of a girl or woman, you don't just change that individual, you change her family and then her community.

The environmental movement could do a better job incorporating the message about the connection between poverty and environmental degradation, and building that message at the grassroots level.

What keeps me motivated is going out to the field and seeing programs that incorporate a focus on both people and the planet, and seeing how mutually reinforcing they can really be.

The difference between rich and poor is becoming more extreme, and as income inequality widens the wealth gap in major nations, education, health and social mobility are all threatened.

There is no doubt that a woman's economic empowerment is very much interconnected to her health and the well being of her children.