With white sandy beaches, cerulean waters, and lush jungles, Indonesia’s Raja Ampat Islands are some of the world’s most beautiful islands—and currently under threat from a growing plastic waste crisis. Covering 40,000 square kilometers of land and sea off the northwest tip of West Papua, Raja Ampat lies at the intersection of the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean tides in a biodiversity hotspot known as the Coral Triangle. 

One of the biggest challenges facing China’s future development is water, which must support the country’s 1.4 billion people and booming industries. Despite being one of the top five countries with the largest freshwater resources, on a per capita basis, China faces serious water shortages which are further compounded by a highly uneven spatial distribution and precipitation: the densely populated north suffers from acute water shortages whereas the south is prone to severe floods. To optimize the allocation of water resources, China has embarked on the construction of a mega engineering project, the South North Water Diversion project (SNWD).

Connected and healthy rivers deliver diverse benefits that are often overlooked: freshwater fish stocks that improve food security for hundreds of millions of people, nutrient-rich sediment that supports agriculture and keeps deltas above rising seas, floodplains that help mitigate the impact of floods, and a wealth of biodiversity. Navigating Trade-Offs Between Dams And River Conservation, a new report in the journal, Global Sustainability, reveals that if all proposed hydropower dams are built, over 260,000 km of rivers (160,000 miles), including the Amazon, Congo, Irrawaddy, and Salween mainstem rivers, will lose free-flowing status.

In Sidoarjo City, Indonesia, student river detectives catalog the microplastics they sample from the Brantas River, the longest river in East Java. Plastic waste threatens this water that seventeen million people depend on for drinking water, fishing, and irrigation. Daru Setyorini and her team from ECOTON (Ecological Observation and Wetlands Conservation) organized this program to educate youth and inform policymakers on the scope of the problem. 

“There is little doubt that tens of millions of people will be displaced over the next two to three decades due in large measure by disaster and other environmental changes affected by climate, with the majority displaced within the borders of their own countries. The United States has a special responsibility to lead on issues of climate change, migration, and displacement,” said Eric Schwartz, President of Refugees International, at a recent event presenting a Blue-Ribbon Task Force report on climate change and migration.

In our top post for June, Steve Gale shares 5 consequences out of the National Intelligence Council’s recently released Global Trends report that development actors should be particularly attuned to. In addition to the “long tail” of the COVID-19 pandemic, the report recognizes the environmental consequences of climate change, including unprecedented numbers of wildfires, increased intensity of tropical storms, and sea-level rise. As a result, migration will be more pronounced and require more targeted aid approaches as demographics shift.

How should the international community support the stabilization of Afghanistan after U.S. and NATO troops withdraw? Answers from President Biden, high ranking U.S. administration officials, and lawmakers have focused on funding the Afghan military and police and remotely retaining U.S. lethal capacity. Development aid is mentioned only in the vaguest of terms. But as withdrawal plans solidify, peace and resilience against insurgencies urgently require the administration to shift the focus to development and include support for local environmental governance. Looking at how crucial forests are to Afghanistan’s local economy and governance systems, we sketch the resource-conflict links and propose possibilities for local, environmental governance that the international community could support to quell insurgency and build the political, economic, and environmental foundations for peace in the country.