Food has long been used by countries to wage both war and peace, and the post-war era of American food dominance is no exception. Bryan McDonald, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, traces the United States’ “Food For Peace” strategy in his recent book, Food Power: The Rise and Fall of the Postwar American Food System, arguing that “food was central to national security” during this period.

In 2017, four environmental activists were murdered every week on average—most of them in Latin America, and most of them targeted for protesting industries like logging or mining. These shocking numbers may finally start to taper off, if three new initiatives launched just this month are successful at protecting people’s right to a clean environment—and its defenders.

Barbuda—an island once full of people—has been rendered completely uninhabitable by Hurricane Irma. Every single resident was evacuated from the island, and some are not planning to return. Climate-induced migration and displacement is not usually this dramatic, but it is not uncommon: Since 2008, UNHCR estimates that an average 21.5 million people each year have been forcibly displaced by weather-related natural disasters, like floods, storms, and wildfires.

Over the last 60 years, more than two-thirds of the world’s remaining biodiversity hotspots have experienced armed conflict. The effects have been myriad, from destruction as a result of military tactics to indirect socioeconomic and political changes, like human migration and displacement. This so-called “war on wildlife” has important implications for conservation and peacebuilding efforts, according to a recent literature review published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

As climate change threatens the stability of ecosystems around the world, the preservation of forests is seen as a “win-win” solution to curbing planet-warming emissions while producing value for developing country economies.

Despite recent press coverage about the violence against international environmental defenders, another prominent figure has been murdered in cold blood.

The Earth’s front-line defenders are disappearing at an astonishing rate. On average three environmental activists were killed each week in 2015, according to a recent report from the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders. Global Witness, an international NGO that documents natural resource extraction, corruption, and violence, reports a 59 percent increase in deaths last year compared to 2014. In total, 185 killings of environmental defenders were recorded by Global Witness in 2015.

A traditional conservation approach to climate change (e.g., habitat restoration, species protection) has been a primary tenet of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) agenda for decades. But this fall at the quadrennial World Conservation Congress in Hawai’i there were new discussions about tackling climate change in the context of national security and environmental peacebuilding.