Heads of state gathered in New York for the September 19 United Nations Summit on Refugees and Migrants will reaffirm principles of international law, pledge to treat asylum seekers more humanely, and promise to improve coordination between humanitarian and development organizations.

A bipartisan group of defense experts and former military leaders are calling on the next administration to consider climate change as a grave threat to national security.

Most citizens of democratic nations expect their governments to do their very best to make society more egalitarian, productive, adaptive, and resilient. To do so requires governments to track not just today’s headlines but grapple with long-term underlying trends, like globalization and demographic change. Governments must also make assumptions about the future course of these trends and examine how they might collide or build on one another.

Picture your typical farm: Pigs, cows, chickens, goats…and tigers? This may sound far-fetched, but many iconic wild animals – including tigers, bears, and rhinos – are now farmed en masse in China.

Southeast Asia is one of the fastest growing energy markets in the world. Regional demand for energy may grow by as much as 80 percent and electricity demand more than triple by 2040. To keep up, governments are working to expand coordination across borders and create a broader regional energy grid (indeed their efforts predate their northern neighbors’ recent announcement of a “supergrid” by several decades).

When wildfires become unstoppable, consuming forests, farmlands, communities, and anything else in their path, how will those affected cope? When typhoons slam coastal populations, dumping over a foot of rain in a single event, who will be there to help mop up? When seas rise up, drowning centuries-old communities, where will the displaced go?

Conflict is typically viewed as a failure of social and political systems and almost never as a method of transforming dysfunctional or fractured societies into cohesive units. However, in an analysis of the discourse around climate change and conflict in Local Environment, Melissa Nursey-Bray concludes that conflict is a sometimes-necessary step in a complicated process to create stable societies. Nursey-Bray separates the climate-conflict discourse into two baskets: climate change as a security risk and climate change as one of many factors that contribute to insecurity.

In the mountains of northern Afghanistan, between Pakistan and China, a region that has historically rejected the Taliban has become the group’s second-largest source of revenue. The twisting tale of Kuran wa Munjan reveals the challenges of extracting precious minerals in unstable and fragile states.