As Beijing prepares to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, China’s environmental activities are once again on center stage. The Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum took the top spot this month with Karen Mancl and Richard Liu’s coverage of the new program report, “Closing the Loop on China’s Water Pollution,” which details what China can learn from New York, Washington, D.C., and Singapore, to advance its wastewater and carbon reduction targets.

When Farhad Ahma returned to his native country last year on a work trip, his first thought was of his small daughter back home. The air around him was so thick with pollution, he couldn’t imagine she would survive the climate in this region of northeastern Syria. Ahma himself struggled to breathe almost as soon as he arrived, nauseated by the heavy smell within a couple hours. He was born and raised nearby, in a city called Qamishli, but he had lived in Berlin for some time now. Returning was a shock to his system.

Trouble is brewing on the Nile. For years, use of the river was mainly about the needs of Egypt, by far the largest and most powerful riparian country in the basin. But since the Arab Spring of 2011, the situation has changed considerably. Egypt’s troubles over the last decade have weakened its ability to project power southward, while upper riparian states—Ethiopia in particular—have enjoyed a period of economic growth and relative stability, which has led them to look at the great river as an important national resource. Tensions have come to a head since Ethiopia announced the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), construction of which is now almost complete. Once full, the resulting reservoir will be larger than the whole of Greater London. Much of the water it holds would have previously reached Sudan and Egypt largely unhindered.

A quiet disruption to the established financial order is underway: Around the world, institutions are pulling their investments out of fossil fuels. Climate activists campaigning for divestment suggest that such economic rearrangements might keep oil, gas, and coal in the ground, curbing carbon emissions. In parallel, some high-profile advocates call for reinvestment in renewable energy. But can the financial sector really drive the structural changes needed to address climate change—and, more fundamentally, climate justice? 

Its name conjures an image of vivid deep blues. But when cobalt is dug out of the ground in ore form, there’s barely a hint of the rich hue it lends its name to. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which produces more than half of the world’s supply, it takes the form of heterogenite, a dull brownish mineral that could easily be mistaken for small clods of dirt.

But people die for this mineral. Children suffer for it. Livelihoods, educations, neighborhoods, environments and personal safety are sacrificed for it.

At the September 2019 United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Climate Summit, the U.S. delegation, under the shadow of intended withdrawal from Paris, did not volunteer a speaker. Attention instead focused on China. As the world’s largest carbon emitter, China was poised to assert leadership on the climate crisis.  However, perhaps lacking the sibling rivalry pressure that brought the U.S. and China together in 2014 on a joint climate agreement, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi offered no new commitments: no carbon tax, no increased investment in renewables, and no announcement to set a more ambitious coal consumption cap.

Ignoring environmental laws in Timor-Leste to build a petroleum infrastructure project could mean serious problems for communities including environmental destruction, loss of land, and loss of livelihoods. Communities are already facing some of these problems because project proponents haven’t fulfilled their legal obligations to do extensive environmental research and planning to mitigate any damage to the local environment. The supporters have also failed to meaningfully involve local communities, including interested experts, academics, and civil society groups, in this process.

“Today we face two existential threats: nuclear annihilation and catastrophic climate change,” writes Daniel Poneman, former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Energy, in his book, Double Jeopardy: Combating Nuclear Terror and Climate Change. “Both stem from human origins. We need to fight both threats aggressively.” At a recent event hosted by the Wilson Center, Poneman discussed his book. While the dangers of nuclear energy are clear from incidents like Fukushima and Chernobyl, Poneman proposes policies that aim to encourage a safe, non-carbon baseload power that responds to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2018 report and keeps our global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, per the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.