Huo Chang grows visibly exasperated as he speaks about his city’s water crisis. From his office in Beijing’s largest state-owned environmental investment and service company, China Energy Conservation and Environmental Protection Group (CECEP), the water expert explains how Beijing is in the throes of a population and economic boom that has left its water resources both polluted and depleted. In response to these opposing pressures, the city turned to controversial measures to avoid a Cape Town-like Day Zero crisis in which Beijing would no longer be able to meet the daily water needs of its population of nearly 22 million.

In January 2017, President Anthony Carmona swore in Nikoli Edwards, age 25, as the youngest temporary senator in Trinidad and Tobago’s history. “I have been very much involved in piecing together the puzzle when it comes to how we develop the holistic young person in Trinidad and Tobago,” said Senator Nikoli Edwards in a Wilson Center interview with Roger-Mark De Souza, a Wilson Center Global Fellow, on Edwards’s personal journey into youth advocacy and the importance of engaging young people in decision-making.

“China can simultaneously be the world’s biggest polluter and the leading developer and employer of clean energy technologies,” said Joanna Lewis, an associate professor of science, technology, and international affairs at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at a recent event at The Brookings Institute on China’s local and global environmental agenda. “It’s not just megawatts being added, it’s actual investment in the innovation of these [renewable energy] technologies.”

“Adolescence is a time to support young peoples’ access to information, to education, to skills and to services that can result in a healthy and safe transition into adulthood,” said Sarah Barnes, Project Director of the Maternal Health Initiative, at a recent Wilson Center event on engaging youth and protecting their sexual and reproductive health and rights. “It’s time to make adolescents a priority,” said Barnes.

It is imperative that countries adopt a human security approach to achieve “freedom from hazard impacts”—nationally through a scientific disaster risk reduction strategy and internationally through climate diplomacy.

This summer, Iraqi citizens in Basra demonstrated in the streets to protest a serious public health crisis caused by polluted water. The condition of their water infrastructure was deplorable after years of devastating wars, corruption, and droughts and regional hydropolitics. More than 100,000 people have reportedly been poisoned by polluted water, while recent estimates warn that some 277,000 children are at risk of diseases, such as cholera due to rundown water and sanitation facilities at schools.

President Donald Trump has in many ways worked as President Barack Obama’s foil, rolling back legacy environmental protection regulations and questioning the merit of environmental causes. However, since taking office, his administration has also taken a hard policy line against wildlife crime, continuing and even furthering Obama’s momentum.