With the Sustainable Development Goals nearing their one-year anniversary, the global community continues to strive toward eradicating poverty by 2030. In order to achieve this ambitious target, many international development practitioners are embracing a more holistic approach to development, combining traditionally single-sector programming, like health or environment work, into more comprehensive efforts. But such integrated development is sometimes easier said than done.

Early this June, the Israeli government cut off drinking water to people living in the Salfit region of the West Bank and three villages east of Nablus. The consequences have been dire. Thousands of Palestinians have been left with no running water in their homes, and factories have been forced to shutter. The power imbalance that leaves Palestinians so vulnerable to Israeli turns of the valve plays out every year, made possible by Israel’s occupation of the water-rich Golan Heights in 1967. What is perhaps most surprising is that the situation persists.

Heads of state gathered in New York for the September 19 United Nations Summit on Refugees and Migrants will reaffirm principles of international law, pledge to treat asylum seekers more humanely, and promise to improve coordination between humanitarian and development organizations.

A bipartisan group of defense experts and former military leaders are calling on the next administration to consider climate change as a grave threat to national security.

Accurate measurements of wealth are useful for developing more targeted and effective poverty reduction programs. Unfortunately, such metrics are few and far between, as data on economic livelihoods tends to be expensive to obtain, and once collected, is often unreliable.

Featured side by side at the top of The New York Times home page recently were two stories: one on the United States and China, the world’s largest producers of carbon emissions, committing to a global climate agreement, another on how rising seas are already affecting coastal communities in the United States.

Most citizens of democratic nations expect their governments to do their very best to make society more egalitarian, productive, adaptive, and resilient. To do so requires governments to track not just today’s headlines but grapple with long-term underlying trends, like globalization and demographic change. Governments must also make assumptions about the future course of these trends and examine how they might collide or build on one another.

Picture your typical farm: Pigs, cows, chickens, goats…and tigers? This may sound far-fetched, but many iconic wild animals – including tigers, bears, and rhinos – are now farmed en masse in China.