More than 40 years ago, the Soviet Union attempted to harness hydropower to modernize Afghanistan. Between 1960 and 1968, they poured money and technical knowledge into the 100-meter Naghlu gravity dam outside Kabul and a village for its workers called Sharnak. Although the town has been damaged and the boons of modernity remain elusive for many Afghans, the dam remains a crucial source of power for the capital and is the largest power plant in the country with an installed capacity of 100 megawatts.

“Turbulent and possibly revolutionary times are ahead for U.S. energy and environmental policy,” said Bobby Magill, a senior science writer at Climate Central, at the Wilson Center on February 3. “If there’s one message the Trump Administration is sending about environmental and climate regulations, it’s this: The future will not look like the past.”

In a recent article published in PLOS ONE, Juliann E. Aukema, Narcisa G. Pricope, Gregory J. Husak, and David Lopez-Carr address the impacts of climate change and population growth on areas with vulnerable ecosystem services and biodiversity, and in reverse, how degraded ecosystem services effect vulnerable populations. The authors analyze locations between 50 degrees latitude north and south that had changing precipitation patterns in the past 30 years.

It’s often assumed that in the modern era, food security is an achievable goal. But between 2007 and 2008, a confluence of conditions shook the international food system to its core, fueling unrest and riots in more than 40 nations around the world. What’s more, this “perfect storm” may have been only a harbinger of challenges to come, according to a new report by Emmy Simmons of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

The effects of climate change combined with breakdowns in governance are leading to food insecurity “on a scale that we’ve rarely seen,” said Alex de Sherbinin, associate director of Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network, at the Wilson Center on January 26.

Large-scale land acquisitions, otherwise known as “land grabbing,” are often believed to lead to resistance from affected local communities. According to an article by Ruth Hall et al. in The Journal of Peasant Studies, however, “political reactions ‘from below’ to global land grabbing have been vastly more varied and complex than is usually assumed.”