“What bothers me is that people tend to look at these rivers and these polluted beaches and think ‘somebody needs to clean it up’—that’s just completely wrong. Because not only is it almost impossible and inefficient, but it’s really not the solution. The solution is prevention,” says Tiza Mafira in the film, Story of Plastic, as she takes a boat trip down the polluted Ci Liwung River that flows through Indonesia’s capital city, Jakarta.

As the warm relationship between U.S. President Donald Trump and Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro comes to an end with the former’s electoral defeat in November 2020, the next two years (Bolsonaro is up for reelection in 2022) could prove to be strenuous for the bilateral relations of the two largest economies in the Western Hemisphere. President-elect Biden has signaled that combatting climate change will be a priority in his administration. Now, without the cover of a U.S. administration that denies climate change, Brazil could become further isolated in international environmental politics. All of this complicates the political realities for President Bolsonaro, whose political survival depends on maintaining his coalition of fanatical supporters, the agricultural sector, and former and current members of the military. Still, given U.S. concerns about Chinese influence in the region, the Biden-Bolsonaro relationship could prove to be low-key and practical.

The significance of the Biden-Harris administration for the world’s women and girls cannot be overstated. The current status of women and girls is grim. The COVID-19 pandemic and four years of dangerous policies designed to strip women and girls of their reproductive and economic autonomy and punish them—first for their biology, and second for their gender—have slowed and even reversed decades of progress toward gender equity. Systemic racism and policies meant to further exclude and disenfranchise minority communities have targeted women of color with tragic results.

A new Global Fragility Strategy, released late last year by the U.S. Department of State, signals a growing awareness of the role that environmental issues play in fragility, conflict, and peace. According to the State Department’s Office of Foreign Assistance, in the last five years alone, “the U.S. government has spent $30 billion in 15 of the most fragile countries in the world.” These “large-scale U.S. stabilization efforts after 9/11 have cost billions of dollars but failed to produce intended results,” writes Devex’s Teresa Welsh. As a result, Congress passed into law in 2019 the Global Fragility Act, legislation that directed the Department of State to lead the development of a new 10-year Global Fragility Strategy that sets out a new U.S approach to conflict prevention and stabilization in fragile contexts.

Where the murky brown waters of the Pearl River meet the opaque green South China Sea, a trail of floating plastic debris is gathered by the currents as they flow past Macao, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong. I first noticed this floating litter while standing on the deck of a research vessel in 2017, scanning the waves off the western coast of Lantau island for signs of Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins as part of a monitoring program run by the Hong Kong Dolphin Conservation Society. A glimpse of these rare animals was often overshadowed by the foamed polystyrene pollution (also known as expanded polystyrene (EPS) or by the proprietary name Styrofoam) from fish boxes and fishing buoys. And this was not just a problem in the water; as we conducted surveys between Hong Kong’s islands, we passed beaches covered in white plastic, strewn along the shoreline like snow. 

The United States is facing a crucial moment, one in which more pregnant women are at risk of becoming housing insecure than at any other time in recent history. This leaves an unprecedented number of mothers and babies vulnerable to the associated adverse health risks.  Housing instability – which includes challenges ranging from struggles paying rent to chronic homelessness – harms maternal and neonatal health as much as smoking during pregnancy. The economic effects of COVID-19 threaten to exacerbate the adverse health outcomes associated with homelessness.

For years, analysts have disputed the extent of climate change’s role in conflict. But the nature of climate risks can stifle those looking to define them.

The Syrian civil war has raged for almost a decade now, and in the climate security community it can feel as if we’ve spent at least that long arguing about its causes. For every claim about the impact of extreme drought in the lead up to 2011, there’s been blowback, with some scholars arguing that the climate angle has been exaggerated at the expense of other causes of the conflict. And for every argument about rural-to-urban migration, there have been suggestions that its impact in precipitating protests has been overstated. Amid some overly forceful media assertion about the significance of climate change—and valid fears that invoking the environment might be seen as absolving guilty parties, despite efforts to highlight the regime’s ultimate culpability—climate security analysts have struggled to fully pinpoint climate’s precise contribution to the conflict. Cue uncertainty, controversy, and sometimes fierce academic polemics.