Launched in Beijing in 2013, the highly successful grassroots “Empty Your Plate” campaign encourages Chinese consumers to eliminate food waste from their meals. Starting with blog posts on Weibo (China’s equivalent of Twitter), this campaign rapidly swept the entire country and attracted support from the central government, which later issued a series of policies urging restaurants to use smaller dishes and remove minimum charges. However, the volume of food waste in China is still astonishing.

At the G20 Summit in Hamburg early July 2017, leaders of the world’s strongest economies issued a joint statement reaffirming their commitment to the Paris Climate Accord. President Trump—the lone outsider—had announced in early June he would withdraw the United States from the agreement. As China doubles down on meeting its Paris targets, the chasm between the world’s two largest emitters and energy consumers continues to widen as previous joint efforts to curb carbon emissions fade away. Post-summit headlines focusing on the “G19” nations suggest America has abandoned international cooperation against climate change. But some U.S. cities and states are continuing the climate fight with their Chinese counterparts.

Capable of upending rural livelihoods, compromising institutions of governance, and inducing new patterns of migration and crime, global water stress has emerged as one of the principal threats to U.S. national security, said David Reed, senior policy advisor at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and editor of WWF’s new book, Water, Security and U.S. Foreign Policy, on June 27 at the Wilson Center. Four defense and development leaders – retired U.S. Marine Corps General James L. Jones; Paula Dobrianksy, vice chairwoman of the National Executive Committee of the U.S. Water Partnership; retired U.S. Navy Admiral Lee Gunn, vice chairman of the CNA Military Advisory Board; and Kristalina Georgieva, chief executive of the World Bank – joined Reed for a panel discussion of water’s central role in global stability and prosperity.

“All of Reykjavik might be able to fit in that apartment block,” remarks Einar Magnusson, the vice president of business development for Iceland-based Arctic Green Energy Corporation (AGEC), as he drives past miles and miles of Beijing’s residential skyscrapers. Following Jiang Zemin’s visit to Iceland in 2002 – the first-ever by a Chinese President – the two nations opened a new chapter in their partnership, which was originally founded upon shared strategic interests. China’s interest in cleaner energy sources has led to a fruitful area of cooperation with Iceland, where geothermal plants generate 66 percent of the country’s primary energy and provide nine in ten households with heat.

Coal — the reigning king of China’s energy sector — generates 74 percent of the country’s electricity and is the main source of the staggering air pollution blanketing Chinese cities. Prompted in large part by the air pollution problem, the Chinese leadership has begun to pivot away from coal by strengthening monitoring and enforcement to limit coal-fired power plant emissions, piloting CO₂ emissions trading projects, accelerating expansion of renewables, and committing to CO₂ reductions in the Paris climate agreement.

Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink: All five of the most popular posts last month focused on water scarcity.

The final two parts of our “Choke Point: Tamil Nadu” series, which explores the conflicting demands for water, food, and energy in the South Indian state, took the top spots. In June’s most popular post, Circle of Blue’s Keith Schneider reports on Tamil Nadu’s leadership in India’s transition to solar and wind energy, which use far less of the country’s scarce water resources than coal and nuclear power plants. Schneider also wrote “New Media Helps Galvanize Tamil Nadu to Fight a Toxic Legacy,” which describes an environmental activist’s fight against industrial water contamination.

With a capacity of 3,300 MW, Sichuan’s Ertan Hydropower Plant—once China’s largest—promised to alleviate provincial energy shortages and spur economic growth when it began generating electricity in 2000. However, in what came to be known as the “Ertan Incident,” provincial officials halted all clean energy generation in Sichuan soon after the plant came online. The Sichuan power company was obligated by law to buy half of its power from coal-fired power plants, regardless of their inefficiency or environmental impacts. To keep the coal burning, the dam was forced to operate at a major financial loss.

“As new energy options emerge to meet global demand, nations that lead stand to gain; should the U.S. sit on the sidelines, it does so at considerable risk to our national security,” advises the latest report from CNA’s Military Advisory Board (MAB), a group of retired generals and admirals.