In the run up to COP 27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, the first summit of its kind to be hosted in the region, water is rising on the agenda, and for good reason. In a new essay for the Wilson Center, Global Fellow Peter Schwartzstein explores how governments across the Middle East are approaching a world with less water – and to what effect. Drawing on a decade of environmental reportage from the Middle East, Schwartzstein sketches out how, why, and with what consequences states have adopted often dramatically divergent strategies.

2022 was a summer of climate extremes across the globe. Multiple heat events simmered across China and Europe, also in regions that are not “supposed to be this hot,” such as the United Kingdom. The western United States also baked in unusual heat, but perhaps the most damaging episode of the season occurred when extreme precipitation caused major flooding in Jackson, Mississippi. This untimely deluge exacerbated a pre-existing water infrastructure crisis in that city, leaving its 150,000, predominately black, residents without access to safe water for days. 

Diplomacy between cities, counties, states and regions is critical to ensuring that diplomatic doors between countries are left open throughout changing political cycles at the national level. Such efforts are more important now than ever, especially for the climate crisis. As we head into COP27 with the message “from ambition to implementation,” cities have a critical role to play as the venues where many of the policies discussed at international climate negotiations will play out.

Recycling in the United States is failing. Only 50 percent of packaging is currently recycled. For plastics the rate is lower, only nine percent. The U.S. packaging recycling rate is far below many other countries and has been stagnant for over a decade because our waste management infrastructure is fragmented, inefficient, and underfunded. U.S. city and county governments spend millions of taxpayer dollars each year to manage an expanding and increasingly complex array of packaging waste they had no input in designing or creating. U.S. recyclers are struggling with poorly designed packaging that cannot be recycled and adds cost to the recycling system, and brand owners are unable to source the recycled content they need to honor their public sustainability commitments. Under the current system, consumer packaged goods companies have little incentive to change. 

Secretary of State Anthony J. Blinken recently reaffirmed the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)—a nation located in Africa’s heart—as a “geostrategic player and critical partner” for the United States. It is a country that features prominently in climate change discussions, not only because of  its vast natural resources (including mineral wealth estimated to be the largest in the world, as well as possession of a forest cover second only to the Amazon Basin), but especially due to its cobalt reserves.

On November 15, the world population is projected to reach 8 billion people. As we approach that milestone, there’s no denying that our rapidly growing human population also places extraordinary pressure on the environment. The human population has doubled in the last 50 years, while wildlife populations have been cut in half.

Over decades, billions of small lentil-sized plastic pellets, called nurdles, flooded out of the wastewater pipes of Formosa Plastic’s plant in Calhoun Texas into the Gulf of Mexico. For decades, Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation fisherwoman in a rural fishing town called Seadrift, has been tracking and collecting data on the company’s nurdle pollution. In 2019, after three years of constant sampling, she and her scrappy volunteers won a dramatic legal victory with a consent decree mandating 50 million in penalties for past pollution and fines if they do not clean up previous pollution or maintain zero discharge of plastic.