“I think we have to remember not to forget what these diseases did in the past and to actively collaborate, to work with each other, and to communicate well that vaccines work,” said Dr. Paul Duprex, Director of Pitt’s Center for Vaccine Research and Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at a recent Wilson Center event on the development of a COVID-19 vaccine, co-sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt), March of Dimes, and the Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation.

“If there’s one message, it’s health systems need to be resilient, agile, and equitable,” said Uzma Alam, a researcher at the Africa Institute for Health Policy Foundation and Senior Program Officer of the Africa Academy of Sciences. “No one person, no one community, no one minority can be left behind. After all, your health system is as agile, as resilient as your weakest link.” She spoke at a recent Wilson Center event co-sponsored with the Population Institute, “Lessons from Africa: Building Resilience through Community-Based Health Systems.” The event focused on how locally led interventions improved the resilience and responsiveness of health systems in sub-Saharan Africa. 

“Climate change has the potential to be a very important confidence-building measure between the United States and China,” said Sharon Burke, Senior Advisor of the International Security Program and Resource Security Program at New America. “Because no matter what else is happening in our relationship, we can succeed together on climate change.” She spoke at the launch for a project co-led by the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change & Security Program and adelphi, “21st Century Diplomacy: Foreign Policy is Climate Policy.” Hosted as part of the Berlin Climate and Security Conference, the discussion focused on the “climate superpowers” section of the project.

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) poses numerous challenges for the Nile river basin, but it also presents an opportunity for regional collaboration and shared prosperity, said Aaron Salzberg, Director of the Water Institute at the University of North Carolina and Wilson Center Global Fellow, at a recent event hosted by the University of North Carolina’s Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, communities across the globe are experiencing unprecedented climate disasters.

According to modeling by ProPublica, the Pulitzer Center, and The New York Times Magazine, in the event that governments take “modest action to reduce climate emissions, about 680,000 climate migrants might move from Central America and Mexico to the United States by 2050.” That number leaps to above a million people in a scenario where no action is taken. The impacts of climate change on people’s decision to move are not constrained to the developing world, or even across borders. A recent study found that one in 12 Americans currently residing in the southern U.S. will move to California and the Northwest over the next 45 years because of climate influences.

Southeast Asian countries, like the Philippines and Indonesia, generate a large amount of plastic waste each year. One item alone—single-use plastic sachets—makes up the majority of this plastic waste, littering beaches, clogging waterways, and polluting surrounding oceans. In our top spot this month, Eli Patton shares potential solutions to turn off the tap on Southeast Asia’s plastic waste problem.

In Bangdong Village, Yunnan, Matthew Chitwood wanted to do his part to keep the stunning mountainous area clean during his two-year residency as a China fellow at the Institute of Current World Affairs. One day he took his empty beer bottles to a local convenience shop for recycling, but the owners would not accept them. He was told to dump them over the embankment. Looking down the slope at the accumulated piles of broken furniture, soggy socks, food waste, and crushed soda cans entangled with plastic bags, Matt refused. Later, Matt’s friends flung his bottles into the gully. He related his frustrating recycling attempt to Mao Da, the founder of China Zero Waste Alliance, who told Matt that “rural trash management itself is a misnomer… It’s really just trash relocation.”