Nearly two-thirds of the world’s population experiences some level of water scarcity—and an estimated one billion urban residents face unreliable drinking water supplies. This global water crisis not only has been recognized by the United Nations, but also prioritized for action as Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6: “Access to Water and Sanitation for All”.

Picture this: A parade of yaks carrying insulated boxes containing meter-long ice core samples from Tibetan glaciers. “Yaks are like cats,” elite glacier scientist Lonnie Thompson explained in a 2023 Wilson Center webinar. They like to wander off — and it takes experienced Tibetan yak herders to keep them moving in the same direction. 

Yet these yak-schlepped ice cores are essential to climate science, added Ellen Mosely Thompson. They store thousands of years of atmospheric dust and gasses in distinct layers and serve as a record of our changing climate.

Advances in reducing maternal mortality were seen all over the world in recent decades. Unfortunately, that progress now has stagnated, and immediate and decisive action is necessary to change the current trajectory.

The world has a sobering debt problem. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the ensuing shocks to commodity prices, governments everywhere have borrowed enormous sums to promote stability and kickstart recovery.

The great power competition underway between the United States and China has a ripple effect in each nation’s neighborhood. As the United States prepares for possible conflict seven thousand miles away in the Taiwan Strait, China is expanding its economic influence in Latin America.

Imagine trying to perform a C-section, or conduct a delivery, in a hospital with no light.

For hundreds of thousands of health workers, this is the reality they face each night. Close to 300,000 women and one million newborns (primarily in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia) die from complications of pregnancy and childbirth each year. Hemorrhage, infection, eclampsia, obstructed labor, and unsafe abortion cause the majority of obstetric deaths— many of which could be prevented with access to timely emergency obstetric care.

Over the past several months, members of the foreign affairs and development communities have heaped a great deal of attention—and interpretation—on the pace of demographic change in Nigeria.