Is it possible to prepare for the unexpected? Could anyone have foreseen, for instance, a nuclear meltdown triggered by an earthquake-induced tsunami? Or a brutal band of transnational militants quickly capturing Iraq’s largest dam while attempting to establish a new Islamic caliphate? Perhaps not exactly, but that shouldn’t stop us from anticipating unlikely events, says Chad Briggs, a risk assessment expert and strategy director of consulting firm GlobalInt.

Nearly 1 billion people lack reliable access to clean drinking water today. A report by the Water Resources Group projects that by 2030 annual global freshwater needs will reach 6.9 trillion cubic meters – 64 percent more than the existing accessible, reliable, and sustainable supply. This forecast, while alarming, likely understates the magnitude of tomorrow’s water challenge, as it does not account for the impacts of climate change.

The fight for control over “the most dangerous dam in the world” is raging.

Since its capture by Islamic State (IS) militants on August 7 and subsequent attempts by Iraqi government and Kurdish forces to take it back, Iraq’s Mosul Dam has been one of the central components of the government’s surprising and rapid collapse in the country’s northern and western provinces. In fact, one might see the capture of the Mosul Dam as the moment IS ascended from a dangerous insurgent group to an existential threat to Iraq as a state.

Under international law, someone who flees their country because of conflict or persecution is a refugee, but someone who flees because of inability to meet their basic household needs is not. In the case of Somalia, it is increasingly difficult to make any meaningful distinction between the two.

Since the early 1990s, the rising price of crude oil and other key natural resources – and the resulting drive by governments and private companies to extract those resources – has led to sharp conflicts in Latin America. At the core of these disputes is the clash between national economic interest and the rights of indigenous people inhabiting the land where most natural resources are located.

Migration is an “extreme” form of climate adaptation, but it does pay off for some, write Md. Monirul Islam et al. in a new article in the journal Climatic Change. In a study analyzing two Bangladeshi fishing communities, one long-established, the other the result of migration, the authors examine the effects of climate-induced migration on livelihood vulnerability.

Asia is going through an unprecedented wave of urbanization. Secondary and tertiary cities are seeing the most rapid changes in land-use and ownership, social structures, and values as peri-urban and agricultural land become part of metropolitan cityscapes. All the while, climate change is making many of these fast-growing cities more vulnerable to disasters.