By the end of 2020, Turkey’s long awaited Ilisu dam project will be complete. Turkey argues this new dam will bring power independence and shore up economic stability. As an added bonus, it ensures water resiliency in a water-scarce region. Meanwhile, environmentalists bemoan habitat destruction, and Iraqis worry about water shortages they will experience down river. For the Kurds, the Ilisu dam project wipes out thousands of years of culture. For them, it’s the latest in a methodical cultural extermination which has been their plight since the founding of the Republic of Turkey.

In the crowded capital city of Manila, the Philippines, one quarter of the population of 15 million people has less than one dollar to spend per day. Residents depend upon the tiny and ubiquitous convenience stores, known as sari-sari stores, for daily essentials like food and hygiene products, much of which are sold in convenient single-use sachets (small plastic pouches) for just a few cents each. These sari-sari stores are the major source of the 150 million sachets used daily in the Philippines. 

“It’s not often that we have the opportunity to go back to a site 20 years later and see what happened,” said Cynthia Gill, Director of USAID’s Office of Forestry and Biodiversity during a recent Wilson Center event on a retrospective evaluation of the “conservation enterprise” approach to biodiversity. Conservation enterprises are income-generating activities that provide social and economic benefits and help meet conservation goals.

As the Atlantic hurricane season kicks off this month, some coastal communities in the United States and small-island nations in the Caribbean are still recovering from last year’s record-breaking damage. At the same time, the heavy rains pounding the East Coast this week are part of a long-term trend towards more severe heavy rainfall events that have led to deadly floods and threaten critical U.S. military bases. Even on sunny days, cities such as Norfolk and Manila contend with high tide or “nuisance” flooding—a phenomenon that has increased as much as nine-fold since the 1960s, according to NOAA.

Many studies on natural disasters and conflict have assumed that disasters make it easier for rebel groups to recruit new members by fueling grievances against the government and lowering the opportunity costs of joining an insurgency, and that this recruitment will increase conflict. But disasters may actually have the opposite effect. My study of rebel groups in the Philippines, recently published in the Journal of Peace Research, suggests that by weakening the organizational structure and supply lines of rebel groups and their ability to enlist new fighters, disasters may instead reduce the intensity of the conflict, rather than increase it.

Blockchain, the newest technology poised to revolutionize numerous industries, could help decentralize electricity systems across Asia, Europe, Australia and the United States. In Brooklyn, peer-to-peer microgrids allow prosumers—energy consumers who generate small amounts of electricity from renewable sources—to trade energy with other users. Blockchain technology provides distributed ledgers that validate, record, and share each transaction, using smart contracts that automatically execute energy trades when the price and volume of the electricity transaction meet the contracted requirements.