Fashion is the second most polluting industry behind oil and is responsible for 10 percent of annual global carbon emissions. The carbon-intensive production of animal hide and plastic for leather and synthetic clothing further compound the impact of this industry, while waste from every stage of the fashion pipeline contributes to rampant air, water, and soil pollution. As experts have known for years, the rise of fast fashion has overextended the world’s resources and demonstrated the fragility of our current methods of production and consumption. If we desire a future in which high quality textiles play a part, we must act to change our habits on a system-wide scale.

The last decade was the warmest on record, with 2020 tied with 2016 for the all-time high average annual global temperature. This 10-year period also saw armed conflicts at severity levels not seen since the Cold War era. Could there be a causal link between these trends?

To the frustration of policymakers and laymen alike, empirical research has been unable to provide a simple and coherent answer to this question. Instead, studies of climate-conflict connections have for a long time continued to produce diverging findings and – occasionally – inspired heated debates. So, where do we stand?

In a review article introducing a new special issue of the Journal of Peace Research (JPR) on the security implications of climate change, we assess the nature and extent of scientific progress in climate-conflict research over the past decade. As yardsticks for measuring progress, we identify seven key research priorities frequently advocated in earlier reviews of the quantitative literature. 

Africa was predicted to be hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, given its poor health systems. However, this outcome has not been the case. Despite the U.S. being the highest spender on health care globally, COVID-19 has shown that its primary care infrastructure is in much need of strengthening. But we should not mistake COVID-19 as the biggest pandemic of our time. If anything, it is only a dry run, with other epidemics brewing on the horizon. Therefore, if the global community is serious about epidemic preparedness, global health security, and protecting the most vulnerable, we need to redesign health systems for resilience. Africa’s lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as from concurrent outbreaks of cholera, Ebola virus disease, yellow fever, and chikungunya, could provide a roadmap.

When the dust settles after wars and armed conflicts, people are eager to rebuild their lives and livelihoods in the wake of the devastation wrought upon their country. Often one issue is largely absent in post-conflict reconstruction and development planning: addressing conflict-linked destruction of the environment. 

Plastic pollution has infiltrated every ecosystem in every ocean on the planet, but perhaps the most iconic organisms impacted are the whales. The problem is monumental. For example, consider the blue whale. Our most optimistic estimates put the global blue whale population size at about 25,000 individuals (down 89 percent since before commercial whaling began in 1911). Based on recent estimates, an amount of plastic waste equivalent to about 3.5 times the weight of the entire blue whale population is put into the ocean every year. That staggering figure alone is enough to make one feel, well, blue, but the devastating impact is underscored by the now-familiar images of deceased whales—their guts bursting with plastic bags or completely entangled in derelict or discarded plastic fishing gear.

Eleven months have passed since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO). As we rang in the new year, the world surpassed two million deaths due to COVID-19. While it is encouraging that 77 countries have distributed 168 million COVID-19 vaccine doses, only a small fraction of these are in low-income countries. Vaccinations may not be widely distributed in most of sub-Saharan Africa until 2022-2023. Furthermore, the new COVID-19 variant recently discovered in South Africa is estimated to be 50 percent more contagious, underscoring the need for a collaborative international response.

“For 30 years, a community of researchers, practitioners, and policymakers have been working to untangle the complex relationships between environmental change and human and national security, and find entry points for policies and programs that build on these connections to create a more resilient and sustainable peace,” said Lauren Risi, Project Director of the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change & Security Program at a recent event that featured contributors to a new special issue of International Affairs on environmental peacebuilding.