Haiti has been seriously fished out. As the impoverished country's population has risen to more than 10 million, more and more people have turned to the sea for food.

In Kibera, Kenya, the government clinic gets a shipment of water purification tablets every three or four months. In a week or two the tablets are gone.

Lake Victoria, one of the largest fresh water lakes in the world, is suffering. It is polluted with raw sewage and it is muddy from the erosion of soil from nearby hills that have lost trees and shrubs to people in search of firewood.

After 40 years of describing hurricanes in the dispassionate, clinical terms of engineers and meteorologists forecasters have now rewritten the guidelines on hurricanes to make the impact of high winds more vivid.