Environmental activists in Brazil are under attack. Last year—the worst year on record—57 of them were assassinated in Brazil, the most dangerous country for environmental activists in the world. The last few years have seen a dramatic uptick in killings of people who take a stand against companies and other actors that commit environmental crimes.

“What we do during this decade can be critical for the future of Amazonia,” said São Paulo Research Foundation member, Paulo Artaxo, at a recent Wilson Center event on efforts to support sustainability and development in the Amazon region. The recently accelerating environmental change in the Amazon region warrants greater collaboration between the civil and scientific communities on community and international scales, according to a panel of experts.

Just days before the 2016 Summer Olympics began in Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian city faced an unsavory problem: how to handle its overwhelming sewage. Nearly half of Rio’s municipal wastewater flowed untreated into Guanabara Bay, where the waters were so polluted by sludge that direct contact was deemed a health hazard to Olympic athletes.

Pray for rain. Mega-drought. Winter salmon run nearly extinguished. Sierra snowpack dismal. These were just some of the headlines in California newspapers over the last five years during a historic drought that elevated water security to the top of everyone’s minds.

As climate change leads to more weather variability and natural disasters, the need for adaptation is more urgent than ever. The Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative (ND-GAIN) aims to enhance understanding of adaptation and inform the public and private sectors on actions and investments.

The World Economic Forum’s 2017 Global Risks Report, like other recent analyses of global trends, notes “rising political discontent and disaffection,” but also significant concern for environmental issues. The forum polled 745 leaders, nearly half of whom are from the business community, on the likelihood and impact of various global risks.

The Earth’s front-line defenders are disappearing at an astonishing rate. On average three environmental activists were killed each week in 2015, according to a recent report from the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders. Global Witness, an international NGO that documents natural resource extraction, corruption, and violence, reports a 59 percent increase in deaths last year compared to 2014. In total, 185 killings of environmental defenders were recorded by Global Witness in 2015.

As global climate change affects livelihoods across the world, migration patterns are also changing. In a recent study published in Global Environmental Change, Clark Gray, Valerie Mueller, and I found that since the 1970s, climatic variations have been increasing internal migration across many South American countries, with few exceptions. And many people are headed to cities.