This is what a water panic looks like in a major global city.

People hoard water. They queue for hours, well into the night, to fill jugs at natural springs. Like mad Christmas shoppers, they clear supermarkets of bottled water. They descend on stockers before they can fill the shelves.

In early January of this year, China’s “National Sword” policy banned imports of non-industrial plastic waste. The ban forces exporting countries to find new dumping grounds for their waste, which is estimated to total nearly 111 million metric tons by 2030. China’s decision has exposed deep structural flaws and interdependencies in the global waste management system. Western countries that have long depended on China to take their garbage are now struggling to deal with mounds of plastic trash, while China lacks the low-priced labor needed to effectively sort and process waste.

For the past few years, much of my work as a journalist has focused on wildlife and environmental crime. I’ve covered poaching busts and seizures of everything from pangolin scales and big-cat skins to rhino horn, live turtles and songbirds. I’ve reported on the Asian, African and South American markets that sell animals live, dead and in parts, and about the consumers that drive this black-market trade. I’ve written about China, the largest consumer, where many endangered species products are luxury items bought by the wealthiest and most influential as a way to flaunt power and gain prestige. I’ve also explored the trade here in the United States — the world’s second largest consumer. I covered the ubiquitous bird trade in Latin America, where ownership of pet parrots and other birds is so rampant that few realize these animals are endangered, or that it’s against the law to buy or keep them.

Russia is “playing politics with energy supplies,” said U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson at a major policy speech at the Wilson Center this week. He accused Russia of wielding natural gas “as a political weapon” and said that ensuring European energy security was “fundamental” to U.S. national security objectives. In Europe, the debate is raging over how best to achieve energy security in the face of the twin challenges of Russian dominance and the need to decarbonize the economy. The ongoing securitization of Russian natural gas could not only complicate the road to a low carbon future in Europe, it could also undermine a European integration project that has mostly been a success.

Today, China feeds 1.38 billion people—approximately one-fifth of the global population—with about 10 percent of the world’s arable land. Compared to the United States, where each acre of land feeds one citizen on average, China has only 0.2 acres per person. This people-to-land mismatch helps explain why 9.3 percent of China’s population was undernourished in 2015.

Floods have taken the lives of more than 100 people in northern Bangladesh over the last two weeks. Fully one third of the country has been flooded and some 600,000 people have been displaced in the riverine nation as a result of monsoons in India and Nepal. At international climate forums, Bangladeshi diplomats consistently decry such disasters as part of their urgent calls for action to mitigate changing weather patterns worldwide. But here in the country’s Rangpur-Kurigam region, both authorities and citizens have been reluctant to attribute these deadly disasters to the effects of climate change.

Despite sharing a common element—water—the freshwater community and the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) community have traditionally worked independently of each other, said Jimmiel Mandima, director of U.S. government relations at the African Wildlife Foundation during a recent webinar organized by USAID-supported Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group (ABCG). However, that is starting to change: “Integration will bring value addition and synergy,” he said.