A window into what we’re reading at the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program 

Humanitarians Highlight the Climate-Conflict Nexus  (The New Humanitarian) 

Climate change’s disproportionate impacts on vulnerable populations exacerbate socioeconomic inequalities and conflict, particularly during natural disasters. This vexed connection has led humanitarians and peacebuilders increasingly to address climate and conflict challenges together in order to provide integrated relief, recovery, and aid.

World Food Program Faces Scrutiny Over Fraud in Sudan (Reuters) 

As Sudan suffers an immense humanitarian crisis due to an ongoing internal conflict between the Army Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the U.N. World Food Program (WFP) has provided crucial aid to people displaced by the conflict. Yet its ability to continue this crucial work is now under threat because of allegations of illicit activities made against its top officials in that country. These developments have drawn the attention of humanitarian practitioners and diplomats—who also have concerns regarding WFP’s mismanagement and how it might have contributed to the failure to deliver enough aid in Sudan.  

During the World Wildlife Fund’s Plastic Policy Summit in March in Washington D.C., I grabbed coffee in a white ceramic mug provided by the convention venue. Reusable mugs seemed unusual amid today’s prevalence of single-use cups, prompting me to reflect on how we have normalized single-use: I bought yogurt and soda in returnable bottles in Beijing; generations before us grew up with reuse. Why did we move away from it?

In December 2022, at the Nansha District port in the Pearl River Delta, the China State Shipbuilding Corporation unveiled China’s first oceanographic drilling ship—capable of mining 10,000 meters deep. This launch showcased China’s rapid advances as a major player in the global race to extract critical minerals at the bottom of the ocean.

Venerated in art and poetry, Korea’s verdant mountain forests hold a special place in Korean people’s hearts. Like their political systems and economies, however, forest fortunes in North and South Korea have gone in very different directions since the country’s division more than 70 years ago.

Most citizens of democratic nations expect their governments to do their very best to make society more egalitarian, productive, adaptive, and resilient. To do so requires governments to track not just today’s headlines but grapple with long-term underlying trends, like globalization and demographic change. Governments must also make assumptions about the future course of these trends and examine how they might collide or build on one another.

By comparing “first wave” developing countries, like Sweden and the United States, to “second wave” developers, like South Korea and Japan, Thomas Anderson and Hans-Peter Kohler of the University of Pennsylvania seek to explain why countries that underwent socioeconomic development in the first half of the 20th century have slightly higher fertility levels than those that developed later. Despite “both sets of countries attaining high income and generally low fertility, contemporary gender norms and levels of gender equity differ between them,” write Anderson and Kohler in a new study in Population and Development Review.