The 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community, released on January 29, mentions climate change as a threat that is “likely to fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond.” The report features new topics such as election interference and threats to economic competitiveness while still including continuing threats such as cyber espionage and attacks, terrorism, and climate change. As a statement from Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Daniel R. Coats, for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the assessment provides an overview of the national security threats facing the nation.

On January 22, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Daniel R. Coats released the National Intelligence Strategy (NIS) for 2019, which represents a departure from the last such strategy. While the previous 2014 National Intelligence Strategy specifically noted that food, water, and energy resource insecurity contribute to instability, the 2019 NIS does not mention these concerns beyond a single reference to climate change and resource scarcity as “pressure points.”

The Solomon Islands’ “commercially available forests will be gone in about 15 years” due to deforestation, said Lela Stanley, a Policy Advisor for Global Witness’ Asia Forests team at the Wilson Center’s recent China Environment Forum event. It looks like they are logging about 20 times faster than they should for the logging to be sustainable, she added. While timber from the islands is exported to China—the world’s largest importer and consumer of timber products—local residents and communities bear the brunt of the environmental cost of lost ecosystem services suffered at the hands of the timber trade. And they aren’t alone. China’s insatiable demand for raw materials and its harmful resource extraction practices wreak havoc on the ecosystems of its many producer countries.

Doula Village lies 55 kilometers (34 miles) northeast of New Delhi on a flat expanse of Uttar Pradesh farmland close to the Hindon River. Until the 1980s Doula Village’s residents, then numbering 7,000, and its farmers and grain merchants, thrived on land that yielded ample harvests of rice, millet, and mung beans. The bounty was irrigated with clean water transported directly from the river, or with the sweet groundwater drawn from shallow wells 7 meters (23 feet) deep.

The unabated growth of natural resource consumption raises risks that we will outstrip the capacities of ecosystems and governance institutions. At the same time, to achieve important global goals related to poverty alleviation, public health, equity and economic development such as those embodied in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), we will simultaneously need more resources and better management of natural resources everywhere.