Truth, trust, and transparency are key aspects to sound and sustainable governance of the Arctic, said Ulf Sverdrup, Director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. He was one of a panel of experts who spoke on Nov. 30 at “The Arctic in a Post-Election World,” the first event in a two-part series sponsored by the Wilson Center’s Polar Institute.

“What you do to your women you do to your nation state. And so, if you decide to curse your women, we argue that you will curse your nation state as well,” said Valerie Hudson, University Distinguished Professor and Holder of the George H.W. Bush Chair at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, at the launch of The First Political Order. Co-authored by Hudson, Donna Lee Bowen, Professor Emerita at Brigham Young University, and P. Lynne Nielson, Professor of statistics at Brigham Young University, The First Political Order is the culmination of 2 decades of research on the linkages between the status of women and the status of nation-state security.

“We need to give more weight to the voices of people who are most affected by climate change,” says Vanessa Nakate, a prominent Ugandan climate activist, in this week’s Friday Podcast. At the local, regional, and global levels, Nakate’s work sheds light on the imperative for policymakers to value the lived experiences of oft-overlooked groups such as women, youths, and citizens of developing nations. “When I talk about climate justice, it is not something that I want for the future—it is something that I want right now, because our present is catastrophic,” she says.

If you watched Finding Nemo (who hasn’t?), you may remember Nemo’s home in the beautiful pink sea anemone with its tentacles waving around. These tentacles are able to sting and eat fish, crabs, and sometimes even birds. Lucky for Nemo, clownfish have a mucus coat that protects them from the sea anemone’s poisonous stings. And lucky for the sea anemone, clownfish protect them from being consumed by other fish and provide them nutrients through their food and fecal droppings. Nemo and his fellow clownfish, however, can’t shield these sedentary sea animals from nearly invisible plastic microfibers or plastic preproduction pellets, called nurdles. At Duke University I have been studying one specific species of sea anemone, Aiptasia pallida, which seems to find plastic particularly tasty. My work is part of a larger wave of scientific research around the world looking into how and why sea animals are eating microplastics and how it may impact their health.

“This is real,” said Franka Cadée, President of the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM). “And we can no longer get around it. And we can no longer linger.” She spoke at a recent Wilson Center event, in partnership with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and Johnson & Johnson, launching a new study, Impact of Midwives, published in The Lancet Global Health. If any other intervention could have the same impact as midwives or midwifery, it would be implemented worldwide immediately, she said.

A powerful method for communicating and examining uncertainty, scenario planning has come to the fore in discussions on how to address COVID-19. As scenario planners continue to map the potential consequences of COVID-19, they are finding much in common with risk managers, who use past data to identify and forecast external threats. In our top post this month, Steven Gale suggests that it’s time for scenario planners and risk managers to align and join forces to produce a single foresight capability.

“If solar radiation management were done well—that is, the science is right, the engineering is right, and the policy and governance frameworks around all of the stuff work—then solar radiation management could be a really important, positive contribution to humanity’s responding to climate change,” says Simon Nicholson, associate professor at American University’s School of International Service and co-founder of the Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment in this week’s Friday Podcast interview with ECSP senior advisor and Ohio University professor, Geoff Dabelko. “But, there are all kinds of risks associated with this endeavor.”