The COVID-19 pandemic has had far-reaching, negative impacts on health and well-being, particularly in population mental health. Mental health is strongly related to people’s social environment, and the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted this greatly. Many countries instituted shutdowns early in the pandemic restricting people’s movement both within and between countries. Shutdowns socially isolated people from one another and often led to poor mental health. The highest rates of mental distress occurred during time periods when COVID-19 mitigation measures were strictest and the number of COVID-19 related deaths was highest.

Secretary of State Anthony J. Blinken recently reaffirmed the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)—a nation located in Africa’s heart—as a “geostrategic player and critical partner” for the United States. It is a country that features prominently in climate change discussions, not only because of  its vast natural resources (including mineral wealth estimated to be the largest in the world, as well as possession of a forest cover second only to the Amazon Basin), but especially due to its cobalt reserves.

On November 15, the world population is projected to reach 8 billion people. As we approach that milestone, there’s no denying that our rapidly growing human population also places extraordinary pressure on the environment. The human population has doubled in the last 50 years, while wildlife populations have been cut in half.

In August’s top post, Jiayi Zhou discusses an underexplored dimension of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: Farmland and agriculture. While the negative impacts of the conflict on food security have become readily apparent, the geography of the war clearly shows that Russia currently occupies more than one-fifth of Ukrainian farmland. Zhou observes that Russia’s territorial ambitions are not only seen by its government as the preservation of an important natural resource, but also the extension of an overall Russian nationalism with broader implications for food security, environmental sustainability, and geopolitical ties.

Over decades, billions of small lentil-sized plastic pellets, called nurdles, flooded out of the wastewater pipes of Formosa Plastic’s plant in Calhoun Texas into the Gulf of Mexico. For decades, Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation fisherwoman in a rural fishing town called Seadrift, has been tracking and collecting data on the company’s nurdle pollution. In 2019, after three years of constant sampling, she and her scrappy volunteers won a dramatic legal victory with a consent decree mandating 50 million in penalties for past pollution and fines if they do not clean up previous pollution or maintain zero discharge of plastic.

For many people, stillbirth— the occurrence of a fetal death at 20+ week’s gestation—is a concept. A statistic. Each year, at least 23,000 stillbirths occur in the United States. It occurs in one out of every 160 pregnancies. Yet when these numbers become a reality in your own life, they take on a new meaning.

This article, by Sharon Guynup, originally appeared on Mongabay.

In August, I traveled aboard the icebreaker Kinfish to the Svalbard archipelago, north of the Arctic Circle. Invited to the bridge as we cruised fjords near the 80^th parallel, I was transfixed by towering blue glacier walls, but was confused by the map displayed on one of the ship’s screens. It showed our vessel sailing across a non-navigable frozen sheet.