As the COVID-19 crisis grew this spring, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) revamped its Water Office, renamed it as the Center for Water Security, Sanitation, and Hygiene, and added it to the Bureau for Resilience and Food Security, home to the Feed the Future Initiative.

Placing the Center for Water Security in the Bureau for Resilience and Food Security was a strategic shift. With 70 percent of freshwater use designated for agriculture, this move elevates water as an integral component of resilience and food security. Referencing water security in the Center’s name also highlights the need for water supplies to be managed sustainably and the role that water plays in resilience and peace. 

This year, three pandemics have shaken the fabric of our society, said Les Williams, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer at Risk Cooperative at a recent event co-hosted by the Wilson Center and Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment on building greater resilience for U.S national security. The spread of COVID-19 highlighted the vulnerabilities in our healthcare system. The murder of George Floyd became the tipping point in communicating the risk that Black Americans have been facing for more than 400 years. And a number of natural disasters exposed society’s vulnerability to climate change.

The coronavirus has everyone weighing risk and security within a sliding scale of geographic connections and boundaries. Dots and circles of infection pack our virus maps. We more clearly see the fragility of commodity chains that structure our food systems and energy supplies. The virus easily crosses state borders while security protocols within states have been focused on boundaries between individuals and speech droplets. In many ways, human interaction with this microbe illustrates why an environmental geopolitics perspective is powerful.

At an event organized by the Coalition of Atoll Nations on Climate Change in December 2019, Tabitha Awerika, 21, from Kiribati, urged world leaders to listen to the climate science and to the pleas of those living in the South Pacific. “I will not leave the lands of my ancestors,” she said. “I will not abandon my motherland. I refuse to leave the only place I call home.”

A special type of tree could facilitate peacebuilding in the Sahel. A stretch of semi-arid land south of the Sahara that runs from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean through 10 countries (Eritrea, Sudan, Chad, Niger, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Mali, Algeria, Mauritania, and Senegal). But the western subregion covering the Lake Chad area (the intersection of Chad, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Niger) and Liptako-Gourma (the tri-border zone of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger) in the Sahel has been the scene of a growing humanitarian crisis. Armed groups are terrorizing local populations. Rampant insecurity has forced 1 million people to flee their homes. People have been cut off from their livelihoods. Food insecurity is worsening. Casualties continue to mount. And climate change will likely exacerbate conditions, forcing more people to compete for depleted forest resources and land. More food shortages and instability will surely follow.

Safe water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) are vital for human well-being. However, 1 in 3 people (approximately 2.2 billion) still lack safe drinking water, 4.2 billion do not have access to safely managed sanitation services, and 829,000 people die annually from unsafe water and related sanitation and hygiene around the world.

Climate-related disasters are a major source of human and material losses. Poverty and low level of economic development are important determinants of environmental vulnerability. Achieving stable and sustainable development thus represents an important strategy to reduce adverse impacts of climate change. However, present efforts to evaluate possible consequences of climate change in the future suffer from too optimistic assumptions about economic growth in poor countries, as we document in a new article just published in the journal Global Environmental Politics.