Collapsing ice shelves raised concerns in 2020, but the immediate effects of climate change in the polar regions are merely the tip of the iceberg, write Olivia Popp and Michaela Stith in this month’s top post. What happens in the polar regions doesn’t always stay in the polar regions—it has profound effects on climate and communities around the world.

The nature of climate risks complicates efforts to pinpoint and articulate climate’s impact on conflict. In January’s top post, Peter Schwartzstein draws on years of environmental reporting across the MENA region to share examples of how environmental and climate changes are driving conflict in areas where the climate angle isn’t immediately obvious.  

Approximately 200,000 women in the U.S. are incarcerated—a nearly 800 percent increase over the past forty years. An often overlooked aspect of the increasing rates of women’s incarceration is its impact on women’s sexual and reproductive health needs. In our top post this month, the Maternal Health Initiative’s Hannah Chosid writes about the overlooked needs and barriers to incarcerated women’s reproductive autonomy.

“Climate change will upend the 21^st century world order. From financial systems, migration patterns, and great power competition, to the potential unintended consequences of climate responses, and issues of inequity and the future of democracy, climate change will penetrate our systems, our relationships, and our lives in ways that we have yet to fully understand,” said Lauren Risi, Director of the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program, at a recent event co-hosted by the Wilson Center and adelphi. The panel discussion focused on two topics addressed in the recently launched 21^st Century Diplomacy project—how efforts to address climate change will engage new modes of multilateralism and how to incorporate the increasingly urgent calls for a more equitable and just world.

A powerful method for communicating and examining uncertainty, scenario planning has come to the fore in discussions on how to address COVID-19. As scenario planners continue to map the potential consequences of COVID-19, they are finding much in common with risk managers, who use past data to identify and forecast external threats. In our top post this month, Steven Gale suggests that it’s time for scenario planners and risk managers to align and join forces to produce a single foresight capability.