Over the next two decades, as many as three billion people will join the middle class, even as billions more live without electricity, modern cooking fuel, and safe and reliable access to food and water. Resources are becoming more scarce and more difficult to extract, and combined with environmental factors ranging from climate change to soil erosion, those changes will make meeting middle class demand all the more difficult while leaving the world’s poorest more vulnerable to price shocks and resource shortages. In a recent report, the McKinsey Global Institute concludes that nothing less than a “step change” in how resources are managed will be required if individuals, businesses, and governments are to overcome these trends and pave the way for a more sustainable and equitable future.

Every year, there are mixed reactions over the rankings and the efficacy of the Fund for Peace’s Failed States Index (FSI), the eighth edition of which was released in June. But this year, the criticism seems especially intense.

“Failed means there is no way back. Failed means a binary division between those countries that are salvageable and those beyond redemption. It is a word reserved for marriages and exams. It does not belong in a pragmatic debate,” wrote Claire Leigh for The Guardian in June.

The original version of this article appeared on The Economist.

Economies benefit when people start having smaller families. As fertility falls, the share of working-age adults in the population creeps up, laying the foundation for the so-called “demographic dividend.” With fewer children, parents invest more in each child’s education, increasing human capital. People tend to save more for their retirement, so more money is available for investment. And women take paid jobs, boosting the size of the workforce. All this is good for economic growth and household income. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research study estimated that a decrease of Nigeria’s fertility rate by one child per woman would boost GDP per head by 13 percent over 20 years. But not every consequence of lower fertility is peachy. A new study by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health identifies another and surprising effect: higher inequality in the short term.

Specifically attributing a particular weather event to climate change has been difficult – as one famous analogy goes, it’s like determining which of Mark McGwire’s home runs were because of steroids and which weren’t. But climate attribution science is slowly becoming more accurate and accepted. In “Explaining Extreme Events of 2011 From a Climate Perspective,” a new study appearing in July’s Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, editors Thomas C. Peterson, Peter A. Stott, and Stephanie Herring provide a review of six extreme weather events from last year and offer “some illustrations of a range of possible methodological approaches” to the process of attribution. Among their conclusions, the editors note that, due to climate change, the extreme heat and drought that suffocated Texas in 2011 was 20 times more likely to occur than 40 years earlier. However, the devastating floods that swept across Thailand last year are blamed on a number of other non-climatic factors.

The original version of this article, by Christina Larson, appeared on Yale Environment 360.

Bouncing along bad roads in a jeep through central Mongolia, with bright blue skies and high clouds overhead, we drive for miles through a treeless landscape, passing only dry grasslands dotted with cattle and white yurts. But as we head north – myself, two U.S. scientists, and one Mongolian forestry expert – we begin to notice Siberian pine and larch growing on the northern slopes of rolling hills, but not the southern slopes, and at some elevations, but not others. In water-scarce Mongolia, as my travel companion Neil Pederson of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory explained, the precarious growth of trees is limited by temperature and moisture availability; small variations – northern slopes are slightly cooler and wetter – can make all the difference.

In the “first spatially explicit comparison of groundwater use, availability, and environmental flow for aquifers globally,” a new article in Nature finds that the “size of the global groundwater footprint is currently about 3.5 times the actual area of aquifers.” An aquifer’s footprint is the theoretical size it would need to be to sustainably support use at its current rate, so groundwater footprints being much larger than their corresponding aquifers is a sign of overuse.

Climate change “has been thought of in many quarters as something that affects folks ‘over there,’ and not as much domestically, and I think that’s a mistake,” said ECSP’s Geoff Dabelko in a recent podcast with the Zurich-based International Relations and Security Network. “I think folks are coming to a realization that there are very high economic, political, and ultimately security stakes for the United States.”

We live in an era when the pace and scope of global change – including forces such as population growth, resource scarcity, urbanization, migration, and economic development – increasingly impact all of us as individuals, from our health and security to our environment and economic well-being. This complex web of the global and local has led the Wilson Center to create a new initiative focusing on global sustainability and resilience.

Following on the news that long-time ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko is moving on to a well-deserved post directing environmental studies at Ohio University’s Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs, I am thrilled to announce that I will direct a new Wilson Center initiative on global sustainability and resilience, which will combine the ongoing efforts of the Environmental Change and Security Program, Global Health Initiative, China Environment Forum, and Comparative Urban Studies Project. This new initiative will integrate and build upon their already substantial contributions to the field.