True to essentialist stereotypes, Latin America’s indigenous peoples are the best stewards of the region’s rainforests. But the source of their enthusiasm for environmental protection is more complex than mere ascriptive traits or whether they speak native languages. What’s more, in a development that should be worrying to environmentalists, exposure to the negative effects of extractive industries appears to have a degrading effect on that enthusiasm.

Achieving the next generation of maternal health goals in India, which accounts for almost 15 percent of maternal deaths around the world each year, will require innovative new approaches to stubborn problems.

The waters of Lake Chad sustain 70 million people in four countries. Beginning in the 1970s, the 25,000-square-kilometer lake began shrinking due to excessive drawdown for agriculture and mining. Now only 10 percent remains. The dwindling water supply devastated food production and fostered massive economic and political tensions. Many experts credit the worsening conditions for contributing to the rise of Boko Haram, an extremist group that has killed 20,000 people and forced 2.3 million more to flee.

More than 40 years ago, the Soviet Union attempted to harness hydropower to modernize Afghanistan. Between 1960 and 1968, they poured money and technical knowledge into the 100-meter Naghlu gravity dam outside Kabul and a village for its workers called Sharnak. Although the town has been damaged and the boons of modernity remain elusive for many Afghans, the dam remains a crucial source of power for the capital and is the largest power plant in the country with an installed capacity of 100 megawatts.

The intelligence community’s landmark Global Water Security assessment in 2012, warned of major water-driven challenges to U.S. national security. The combined assessment of several intelligence agencies foresaw many challenges to U.S. policy objectives and national security arising from protracted drought, declining water quality, and more natural disasters in countries important to U.S. interests. The intelligence community further warned of rising social instability, cross-border tensions, and a steady drain of resources away from other development objectives. These warnings have proven prescient.

“Midwives play a vital role in the health care of mothers and babies,” said Samara Ferrara, a midwife from Mexico, at the Wilson Center on February 27. But in many parts of the world they face a confluence of stressors that make working conditions miserable: low and irregular pay; harassment and disrespect from both patients and doctors; and little supplies, training, or say in the policy dialogue about maternal health.

As the 1990s drew to a close, there was a sense that much of the momentum gained at the first Earth Summit on sustainable development, a positive, affirming environmental narrative, was waning.