In August’s most-read post, Nathanial Matthews explains how globally, most water infrastructure isn’t designed to meet the demands of a changing climate. Matthews showcases highlights from a new report, Wellspring: Source Water Resilience and Climate Adaptation, which explores innovative approaches to source water protection in the context of a changing climate. The complications of a changing climate are not always so clear, especially its connection to armed conflict. Our fourth most popular post, by Cullen Hendrix and John O’Loughlin, shares the results of a study that aimed to provide a consensus regarding climate-conflict links.

September 12, 2019 marks one year since South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir and former Vice President-turned-opposition leader Riek Machar signed a new peace agreement. The human and environmental cost of the five-year war it ended has been staggering. Women and girls have often borne the brunt of the violence. Fighting and displacement have also placed tremendous pressure on the country’s abundant wildlife and natural resources. Militarized cattle raiding and competition over access to traditional grazing lands threaten the country’s tenuous stability. Gender-sensitive environmental peacebuilding promises to be one of the strategies needed to resolve these multiple challenges.

“That ain’t no mountain,” said Jennifer L. Turner, the Director of the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum, in response to a picture of a pile of phosphogypsum waste just outside a farming village. She moderated a recent event on the development of environmental law and enforcement in China cohosted by the Environmental Law Institute and The Wilson Center. Since 2013, when the picture was taken, the mountain has grown, she said. She put the image up because many people hear about soil pollution, or illegal dumping, and picture something small. “You don’t picture a mountain towering over a village,” Turner said.

Policymakers and emergency managers tend to build a conceptual wall between natural hazards and terrorism. The causes of—and remedies for—these two kinds of disasters are seen as separate and distinct. But, in the era of climate change, the wall between the two is crumbling.

In July 2019, more than 100 child sex trafficking victims were rescued across the United States. In 2018, Colombian authorities saved more than 80 Venezuelan women and girls from sex trafficking, and later that year, 40 trafficked Ugandan women were saved in Thailand. These individuals were among the 5 million victims of sex trafficking worldwide.

“Today we face two existential threats: nuclear annihilation and catastrophic climate change,” writes Daniel Poneman, former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Energy, in his book, Double Jeopardy: Combating Nuclear Terror and Climate Change. “Both stem from human origins. We need to fight both threats aggressively.” At a recent event hosted by the Wilson Center, Poneman discussed his book. While the dangers of nuclear energy are clear from incidents like Fukushima and Chernobyl, Poneman proposes policies that aim to encourage a safe, non-carbon baseload power that responds to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2018 report and keeps our global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, per the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.

Water security is a pervasive climate issue and one that has increasingly been viewed as a gendered issue. Worldwide, women and girls spend 200 million hours collecting water every day. While doing so, they place themselves at increased risk of assault and become more likely to develop medical issues related to physical labor. They also pay an opportunity cost, as this time could be better spent in school or performing other productive tasks.