Currently there isn’t a lot of good news coming out of the Sahel, the area in Africa that borders the Saharan desert to the north, the Sudanian Savannah to the south, and stretches across the continent. Multiple raging insurgencies, especially in the western part of the region, fuel a news cycle of offensives and counter offensives, responses and massacres.

According to the damning new ‘code red for humanity’ report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the news from the region isn’t likely to get better any time soon.

Although large-scale evacuation efforts have dominated international attention, evacuation is only an option for a “tiny fraction” of the Afghan population, said Vicki Aken, Country Director for Afghanistan at the International Rescue Committee, at a congressional briefing hosted by the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. The briefing was focused on the evolving humanitarian situation in Afghanistan and the need for civil protection in the country. “More than 40 million Afghans will remain in Afghanistan,” said Aken. “And half of them already face critical humanitarian needs.”

Cambodia’s lush Prey Lang rainforest is abundant with animals, insects and birds, including endangered species, and diverse types of forests. It also provides resin tapping and other sources of livelihood for some 250,000 people, many of whom are Indigenous Kuy, living within or adjacent to the forest.

The takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban not only threatens people’s lives, security, and fundamental freedom, but also significantly increases risks of water insecurity both immediately and in the long term. While our hearts and minds are with the people struggling for survival and freedom in Afghanistan today, we should not forget that the implications of Taliban rule will add yet another challenge to the long-term future of the Afghan people, and possibly also to the entire region’s stability.

In 2007, at the (U.S.) National Intelligence Council, a colleague and I set out to determine if we could forecast two distinct political phenomena, the rise and the demise of high levels of democracy. To guide our decade-long forecasts, we relied on a simple statistical model and a spreadsheet of demographic projections from the UN’s 2006 World Population Prospects data set. Now that the experimental period (from 2010 to 2020) has ended, we can look back and ask: How well did these forecasts perform? 

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).

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.