There’s a scene near the climax of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express when Hercule Poirot starts to plot out the possible murderers. There’s Colonel Arbuthnot, who had opportunity and motive. There’s Mr. McQueen, suspicious in his transparent attempts to misdirect the detective. There’s even the haughty, toad-faced Princess Dragomiroff. Like practically everyone on the train, she had good reason to wish the evil Ratchett dead.

The 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment marked a watershed in world environmental politics. Gathered in Stockholm, Sweden, the international community collectively recognized that the technologies and economic models that enable modern development were also driving unsustainable environmental degradation, compromising the vital natural systems on which human well-being depends.

Which nations are most at risk of catastrophic outcomes due to intensifying ecological threats? The third edition of the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP)’s Ecological Threat Report (ETR)—released on October 20, 2022— applies a lens of societal resilience to predict the hotspots most likely to suffer from instability and conflict in the future, and provides projections of ongoing trends to 2050.

In the run up to COP 27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, the first summit of its kind to be hosted in the region, water is rising on the agenda, and for good reason. In a new essay for the Wilson Center, Global Fellow Peter Schwartzstein explores how governments across the Middle East are approaching a world with less water – and to what effect. Drawing on a decade of environmental reportage from the Middle East, Schwartzstein sketches out how, why, and with what consequences states have adopted often dramatically divergent strategies.

In recent years, the urgency of climate action has brought fresh attention to the critical minerals sector. Growing renewable energy investments are driving up demand for resources like lithium, cobalt, and copper, which form the mineral backbone of green technologies. But there are substantial concerns to navigate when it comes to sourcing green energy minerals.

Secretary of State Anthony J. Blinken recently reaffirmed the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)—a nation located in Africa’s heart—as a “geostrategic player and critical partner” for the United States. It is a country that features prominently in climate change discussions, not only because of  its vast natural resources (including mineral wealth estimated to be the largest in the world, as well as possession of a forest cover second only to the Amazon Basin), but especially due to its cobalt reserves.

Climate security is an essential conceptual framework to understand the global interplay of biophysical and socioeconomic forces that threaten our planet. Indeed, it is so important that new currents of science, politics, and advocacy make refining definitions a necessity.