As the U.S. has undergone a rapid and massive shift to natural gas from coal, one benefit has gone almost entirely overlooked: the amount of water needed to cool the nation’s power plants has dropped substantially.

Before world oil prices collapsed late last year, shop owners closest to the banks of the Rio Grande River in Piedras Negras joked that they could hear the groans of Texas drilling rigs advancing toward their fast-growing northern Mexico city.

The landscape of the northeastern Indian state of Meghalaya is rapidly changing. What was once a predominately agricultural economy has shifted to coal mining with significant consequences for people and the environment. “Once you extract coal from the land, it’s really hard to go back to an agricultural economy,” says ECSP’s Sean Peoples in an interview with Wilson Center NOW, about the Global Choke Point film, Broken Landscape.

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]