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Environmental, humanitarian and economic challenges do not exist in isolation, but that is how the world most often deals with them. To take just one example: one of the key challenges facing cities around the globe in the 21st century is flooding. Flooding is determined by environmental factors, from climate change to overcrowding of floodplains with habitation. Flooding is also often a humanitarian disaster when it strikes and can be an aftereffect of big development projects, like hydroelectric dams.
Or take the metals in a cell phone. As Judith Rodin, president of the philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation, noted at her organization's event about "resilient livelihoods" on September 25, tungsten is the "metal that puts the buzz in your cell phone." Mining that tungsten is an economic development opportunity but also too often creates a humanitarian crisis when such economically valuable minerals become a source of conflict—as has been the case in the eastern Congo. At the same time, the mining practices used to extract such metals can be more or less bad for the environment and human health. (...)

The article:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=combining-development-humanitarian-aid-and-climate-change-responses

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UNDP launches "Powerful synergies: gender equality, economic development and environmental sustainability":

http://www.un-ngls.org/spip.php?article4106

The publication:

http://www.undp.org/content/dam/undp/library/gender/Gender%20and%20Environment/Powerful-Synergies.pdf