You’d think that a country blessed with 12 percent of the world's freshwater would be immune to droughts. The people of Sao Paulo certainly thought so – until the Brazilian megacity went dry, leaving residents without water – often for days.

This World Bank blog in honor of World Wildlife Day draws attention to poaching. The illegal capture and killing of wildlife takes place primarily in developing countries but it is not an issue born out of poverty. The criminological community has disproved the notion that poverty causes crime and found rather that many crimes are opportunistic.

Informed by science, communications and policy work, Mapping Ocean Wealth visualizes in quantitative terms all that the ocean does for us today, so that we make smarter investments and decisions for the ocean of tomorrow. Project areas include: ecosystems and their services, policy and influence, and finance and investment. Mapping Ocean Wealth will focus initially on five regions: U.S. Atlantic Coast, the Caribbean, the Gulf of California-Mexico, Indonesia and Micronesia.

The world's national parks and nature reserves receive eight billion tourist visits a year, generating around $600 billion of spending, according to research. The tourism income vastly outweighs the $10 billion a year spent safeguarding them, says a Cambridge University team. The study, published in PLOS Biology, highlights the need for more investment in protected areas, they say.