Forecasts of future climate conditions are fairly good, but forecasts of future socioeconomic conditions are another story. To get a sense of how climate change will impact society, many resort to simply layering future climate conditions on top of current socioeconomic conditions. That’s a mistake, write Wolfgang Lutz and Raya Muttarak in Nature Climate Change. “We see little value in the purely hypothetical exercise of assessing potential impacts of the future climate on a society that will not exist in the future.”

Wilson Center Director, President, and CEO Jane Harman and WWF President and CEO Carter Roberts put their weight behind growing momentum to ensure water stays on the radar for U.S. foreign policymakers in one of last month’s most-read stories.

This week, newly minted Secretary of Defense James Mattis joined a long list of senior U.S. military leaders who have warned about the national security threats of climate change.

John Oldfield called it: last month’s most popular story was once again on the U.S. Global Water Strategy. The Wilson Center’s Sherri Goodman, Ruth Greenspan Bell, and Nausheen Iqbal, like Oldfield before them, urged the new administration to take seriously the development of the strategy, due later this year, and provide “stronger American leadership” on global water issues.

“We are seeing floods, droughts, extreme weather events, migration of people across borders, as well as sea-level rise, and we are going to see increasing challenges,” says Wilson Center Senior Fellow Sherri Goodman in an interview with the German think tank, adelphi.

Hans Rosling, the Swedish statistician, global health advocate, and “edutainer,” passed away this week in Uppsala, according to his foundation, Gapminder.

The first U.S. Global Water Strategy is due in October, and despite a tumultuous start to the year, the U.S. government shouldn’t let this opportunity to demonstrate global leadership pass, says John Oldfield in last month’s most popular story.

The World Economic Forum’s 2017 Global Risks Report, like other recent analyses of global trends, notes “rising political discontent and disaffection,” but also significant concern for environmental issues. The forum polled 745 leaders, nearly half of whom are from the business community, on the likelihood and impact of various global risks.