It is encouraging to see that the United Nations Security Council is beginning to acknowledge the transboundary dimensions of fragility and conflict, as demonstrated by its newly launched Report of the Secretary-General on the situation in the Lake Chad Basin region. The report, which was presented in the Security Council on 13 September 2017, emphasizes the need for regional responses and the enhanced cooperation of different UN and humanitarian agencies as important steps to addressing the unfolding humanitarian crisis. However, while regional responses to address the regional security challenge are desirable, the report would have been stronger if it had highlighted the underlying environmental contributions of the region’s fragility. 

“The sooner you save, the better off you’ll be in life, wherever you live, at whatever age you start,” said Sophie Romana, director of community finance at Oxfam America: “Saving is the key.” Microsavings groups—informal community-based financial pools–can help vulnerable communities build resilience, said representatives from support organizations CARE International, Oxfam America, and the Grameen Foundation  at a Wilson Center event on June 29, 2017.

While governments will play the central role in delivering the Sustainable Development Goals, they can’t do it without the private sector, said experts at the Wilson Center on April 12.

The present understanding of the relationship between environmental conservation and social justice, two of the greatest challenges of our times, is fraught with multiple confusions, especially in the context of developing countries.

CHENNIMALAI, India – There is river and beach sand aplenty in Tamil Nadu. At 130,000 square kilometers (50,200 square miles), the state is about the same size as Nicaragua and has 95 rivers with sandy bottoms and a long Bay of Bengal shoreline. Or did. For almost all of its thousand-year history, the state of Tamil Nadu took all that sand for granted. No longer.

A steadily increasing global population, growing food demand, and changing climate necessitate new kinds of thinking in agriculture but also fields like public health and energy, concludes a new book, Hot, Hungry Planet, by former Wilson Center Public Policy Scholar and current Senior Fellow at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center Lisa Palmer.

In a recent article for New Security Beat, Colin Walch made the case that the abandonment of some communities in Mali to deal with climate change on their own has created “fertile ground” for jihadist recruitment. In a similar argument, Katharina Nett and Lukas Rüttinger in a report for adelphi asserted last month that “large-scale environmental and climatic change contributes to creating an environment in which [non-state armed groups] can thrive and opens spaces that facilitate the pursuit of their strategies.”