The Pacific Institute recently updated its Water Conflict Chronology—a database of water-conflict events that began to take form in the 1980s. The recent updates include the addition of 300 new entries to the database, highlighting the alarming rise of water-related conflicts in the last few years. Despite this overwhelming evidence of a growing trend in water-related conflicts, global attention toward addressing them remains negligible.   

At the opening of the Commission on the Status of Women in New York this past March,  UN Secretary-General António Guterres underscored the importance of stepping up national and global efforts to advance the rights of women. Guterres observed that “many women and girls are also facing a war on their fundamental rights at home and in their communities. Hard-fought progress is being reversed.”

A number of highly respected research entities in the US and abroad—including the US National Intelligence Council and the European Union—produce hefty global trends reports. These valuable in-depth guides inform new policies (such as USAID’s just-released Democracy, Development and Human Rights Policy)—or refresh older ones. They focus on the risks, uncertainties, and opportunities that lie ahead for the international development community, and they can provide an empirical basis to shape ongoing and future aid programming.

Critical minerals—and the soaring demand for them—are a key challenge for policymakers and analysts around the world. The factors driving that demand, especially energy transition technologies like electric vehicle batteries, are usually the focus of discussion. But the story of critical minerals is two-sided; it features both demand and supply. 

A window into what we are reading at the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program

How One Loss and Damage Fund Bore Fruit (The Guardian)  

The Loss and Damage Fund established during the UN COP27 was a monumental breakthrough in the climate finance realm and aimed to provide financial assistance to vulnerable nations impacted by climate change. Such damage can be catastrophic. When Cyclone Freddy hit Malawi in 2023, it killed 1,200 people and displaced 659,000 more. The estimated economic loss exceeded $1 billion, and it landed especially hard on farmers—including the women who make up more than 70% of Malawi’s agricultural workforce. 

The widespread destruction of infrastructure has been a calamitous and common feature across many of the recent wars in the Middle East and North Africa and Ukraine—and urban landscapes such as Aleppo, Raqqa, Kharkiv, Mariupol, and Gaza City have borne the brunt of attacks. Without clean drinking water, electricity, treated sewage, food supplies, and medical services, cities become uninhabitable, disrupting the infrastructure upon which populations depend for basic services, and often leading to their forcible displacement. Civilians are also at risk of malnutrition, starvation, and preventable diseases that spread from dirty water and raw sewage in urban centers.

Earlier this year the media made much ado about drought conditions constraining traffic through the Panama Canal. But is it really all they’re making it out to be?

The most recent drought conditions started with below-average rainfall in late 2022, and by January 2024 were being described as the worst drought in Canal history. The Panama Canal Authority (ACP) ranked 2023 as the second driest year since 1950. News articles reported cargo traffic was reduced by nearly 40% and that the world faced a $270 billion traffic jam in Panama.