After pirates hijacked an Iranian fishing vessel last year near Bosasso, a major seaport in Puntland, Somalia, local authorities observed that the offending boat was casting nets without a license. While piracy has diminished since 2008-2012, when these waters became some of the most lawless in the world, a spate of incidents in 2017-8 has made it clear that the conditions that led to piracy—including incursions from foreign fishing boats—are still a major problem.

“Most fundamentally, we turned the ‘resource scarcity drives conflict’ argument on its head and asked, ‘Can environmental interdependence drive cooperation in ways that can be harnessed to build trust and contribute to conflict prevention and peacebuilding?’” said Geoff Dabelko, Associate Dean at Ohio University’s Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs, about Environmental Peacemaking, which was one of the first books to investigate these questions. In the 15 years since he and Ken Conca, a professor at American University’s School of International Service, published their edited volume, the idea that shared environmental issues could be used to build peace has become a focus of innovative research, policy, and programs.

A recent article in Nature Climate Change has spurred a new chapter in the lively scholarly debate over the potential relationship between climate change and violent conflict. We agree with the article’s authors that there are several forms of sampling bias in this field, including how regions are selected for analysis. But simply addressing this sampling bias will not resolve many of the academic controversies that have raged since the mid-2000s. Our recently published study in International Studies Review examines the mechanisms connecting climate change or its consequences to violent conflict and concludes that to move this research agenda forward, researchers must pay deeper attention to the “nuts and bolts” that shape both climate-related conflicts and our understanding of them.

In 2017, four environmental activists were murdered every week on average—most of them in Latin America, and most of them targeted for protesting industries like logging or mining. These shocking numbers may finally start to taper off, if three new initiatives launched just this month are successful at protecting people’s right to a clean environment—and its defenders.

To further its goals to strengthen the global economy, China has already invested $300 billion of its pledged $1 trillion towards its Belt and Road Initiative—a massive infrastructure investment plan that spans 60 countries across Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. China’s initiative will shift the world’s political, environmental, and economic landscape.

Recently, Nature Climate Change published a new study demonstrating significant sampling bias in the research that informs our understanding of whether climate change will accelerate human conflict. I was a peer reviewer of “Sampling bias in climate–conflict research,” and I wrote an accompanying “News and Views” piece summarizing it. I am fascinated by the issue of sampling bias; it’s perhaps the most consequential and least recognized form of bias in the social sciences, with potentially massive consequences for what we (think we) know about a host of phenomenon.

It should be an excellent time to be a young Iranian: High school and college enrollments in the Islamic Republic rank near the top of Muslim-majority countries. Women have only about two children on average, compared to 6.5 in the mid-1980s. And childhood mortality is projected to approach North American levels in the next 15 years. Yet, as the recent protests show, many young Iranians feel left out. Job growth—especially for young adults—has failed to keep pace with development, while persistently high rates of inflation steadily drive up the cost of living and cut deeply into Iranians’ savings.

Environmental stress and climate change can accelerate instability and conflict—but shared environmental problems can also be a source of cooperation and facilitate peacemaking between states. Transnational environmental problems are common threats and often cross national boundaries, requiring international cooperation to address. In turn, this cooperation can provide a good entry point for building trust and cooperation.