The idea of climate change as a “threat multiplier” has been gaining steam since it was first proposed roughly 15 years ago. This framing acknowledges that climate can interact with existing political, social, and demographic conditions to heighten communities’ security risks—which in turn suggests that problem-solving in the face of these risks must be interdisciplinary.

At a recent Wilson Center event on the shifting geopolitics of critical minerals, Cory Combs, Associate Director at Beijing-based Trivium China, noted that “the nature of global resource competition is changing—and quite rapidly.”

Water sustains life on our planet. And access to clean and safe water is foundational to society. So why has it only been in recent years that water has risen to the top of discussions of climate and security? Richard W. Spinrad, the Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and NOAA Administrator, says that one of the biggest reasons is the major impact that climate-related changes in precipitation like droughts and extreme rainfall are having across the globe: “We’re starting to see things like we’ve never seen before. The nature of storms is changing: We saw five feet of rain fall in Hurricane Harvey. Five feet.”

As the COP27 climate talks in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt fade from the headlines, governments are convening now at another COP in Montreal, Canada: The 15^th Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. In the most-read post for November, Jesse Rodenbiker describes how China’s active leadership as COP15 president is crucial to achieving the meeting’s central aim: The adoption of a new set of global biodiversity targets. Yet China’s role in shepherding this international forum is not without complications. Rodenbiker observes that the country’s extensive protected area program—which could influence the nature of global conservation efforts—includes controversial practices that have displaced communities and reinforced inequality.

We need minerals to build the solar panels, wind turbines, and other technologies that will decarbonize our economies—and we need a lot of them. The World Bank estimates that demand for lithium, cobalt, and graphite could jump by as much as 500 percent by 2050. Yet mining for these resources has had a fraught history, and it continues to be associated with a hefty list of human rights and conflict risks, including  violence, child labor, poor working conditions, land rights abuses, environmental damage and pollution, and a lack of community participation.