At the launch of A New Climate for Peace, a new report on climate-fragility risks produced for the G7 by a consortium of international partners including the Wilson Center, USAID Deputy Assistant Administrator Christian Holmes called water a common denominator for climate risk.

Researchers have been warning about future water scarcity for decades, but new data reveals a majority of the world’s largest aquifers are already running out of water.

President Pierre Nkurunziza’s decision to run for a third term in April plunged Burundi into a state of unrest not seen since the end of the country’s civil war in 2005. Refugees are arriving in neighboring Tanzania, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in the tens of thousands, raising the possibility that the deteriorating security situation could spill over borders.

When the leaders of the G7 countries – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States – met earlier this month, they agreed to make fossil fuels a thing of the past by 2100. At the same time the G7 is also taking steps to make climate change’s connection to conflict a priority in the present.

The world is more connected than ever before, but also more complex. Big, transnational trends like climate change, urbanization, and migration are changing the calculus of geopolitics, while local-level inequalities persist. “[Change] seems to be spinning around us so fast,” said John Hempelmann, president of the Henry M. Jackson Foundation, which honors the legacy of the late senator from Washington State. How can today’s and tomorrow’s leaders adjust to global trends? [Video Below]

Millions of people across the Middle East face drought, scarce drinking water supplies, and poor sanitation due to civil wars and conflict. Meanwhile, resource constraints and foreign military interventions risk more severe humanitarian disasters.

Frequent readers of New Security Beat are no strangers to the PHE approach to development – projects, often community-based, that integrate population, health, and environmental programming in a single intervention. Practitioners suggest that such integrated programming is more effective and efficient than running simultaneous siloed projects, each focusing on a narrower objective. But does the evidence support this conclusion? How effective is the PHE approach?

One of the primary ways climate change is expected to affect international relations is through water. There are more than 270 bodies of water that cross over international boundaries, and various methodologies have identified several dozen that are particularly at risk for tension or conflict. So how is climate change affecting transboundary water politics? Are governments and institutions taking the threat seriously? A few years back, a group of researchers decided to focus on this question.