From climate change to COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine, the world is a landscape of increasing instability. Book-ending the Top 5 posts of June are two articles that explore different aspects of these converging risks. In the top post for June, Steven Gale and Mat Burrows write that globally, younger generations are becoming increasingly disengaged and discontent with their democratic governments, civil society, and institutions. Youth disillusionment is not a result of ignorance to current affairs, but rather a lack of faith in democratic institutions to address today’s most pressing global issues. Tackling youth disillusionment, suggest Gale and Burrows, begins with examining youth engagement trends and placing it at the top of the agenda.

The Sahel region of Africa is a semi-arid, arc-shaped landmass that stretches 3,860 kilometres from Senegal across portions of Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, and even Sudan. It is also the most neglected and conflict-ridden part of the planet, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council.

In 1976, a Belgian Catholic mission and hospital in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was stricken with a mysterious illness that caused fever-like symptoms. Most of the patients who contracted the illness died. A young microbiologist named Jean-Jacques Muyembe Tamfum was called to the mission, where he extracted blood samples from those who had fallen ill. The DRC did not have a functional research laboratory at the time, so Muyembe had to send his samples to Belgium for analysis. The results that came back revealed that they contained a new deadly virus: what the world came to know as Ebola, named after a river near the mission.

As we face the twin crises of biodiversity loss and climate change, natural resource management is now more critical than ever—especially in the protection of one of our most precious resources: water.

The stakes of getting it wrong couldn’t be higher: increasing economic inequities and substandard public health for a growing population. And the evidence that such issues have won the attention of political leaders is increasing, with the June 2022 introduction of a White House Action Plan on Global Water Security that links this crucial issue directly to U.S. national security and offers pathways and proposed resources to advance progress broadly on multiple fronts.

With their blocky stamped metal heads and long arms, the India Mark II and Afridev hand water pumps are hardly aesthetically appealing. What matters is their design. That is, how well do they work?

Introduced in the 1980s, manufactured by the millions, and installed in communities across Africa and Asia, the two hand pumps are the most popular tools for lifting water to the surface from rural underground reserves. In that capacity, the two pumps occupy prominent space in the WASH sector’s long-running and formative debate over whether the global campaign is succeeding or slipping in the effort to attain universal access to clean water, sanitation, and hygiene. 

Not only is the Sahel highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, but it is also one of the regions where climate change is most likely to undermine security and trigger violent conflict. Now more than ever, climate security risks must be effectively integrated into stabilisation and peace operations in order to achieve stability in the region.

Until 2016, the agrarian residents of east Kenya’s Kitui county had never encountered a water quality monitor like Mary Musenya. Wearing a bright blue company jersey and furnished with sample bottles and plastic trays, the young Kenyan is a water safety officer for FundiFix, a tiny rural water supply service company. She is one of 20 staff who manage 130 pumps, plus pipes and water tanks that serve 82,000 people across a 1,000 square-mile service area in Kitui and Kwale counties. 

That future wars will be fought over water, rather than oil, has become something of a truism, particularly with regard to the Middle East. It’s also one that most water experts have refuted time and time and time again. But while this preference for cooperation over conflict may (and emphasis on may) remain true of interstate disputes, this blanket aversion to the ‘water wars’ narrative fails to account for the rash of other water-related hostilities that are erupting across many of the world’s drylands. As neither full-on warfare nor issues that necessarily resonate beyond specific, sometimes isolated areas, these ‘grey zone’ clashes don’t seem to be fully registering in the broader discussion of water conflicts. In failing to adequately account for the volume of localized violence, the world is probably chronically underestimating the extent to which water insecurity is already contributing to conflict.