It was some point in May last year, shortly after ISIS surged into the city of Ramadi, and I was working on a story about Iraq’s fast-disappearing Mesopotamian Marshes. Keen to fact-check a few statistics with the Ministry of Water Resources and to hear the government line on the wetlands’ struggles, I dialed its Baghdad offices. After being passed from official to official like a hot potato, a young employee, Hussein, finally gave it to me straight. “No, no, we don’t have this sort of information,” he said, clearly impatient to get off the phone. “There are much more important things in Iraq right now.”

In a recent paper published by Climatic Change, Nick Obradovich conducts the “first-ever” investigation into the relationship between rising global temperatures, electoral returns, and climate change. Using data from more than 1.5 billion votes cast across electoral contests held in 19 countries, he found that when the annual average temperature for a country rose above 70°F, there was a “marked” decrease in the number of votes received by incumbent officeholders.

Education is seen as a key tool for building resilience to climate change in the developing world. But new research shows that climate change could also make it harder to keep kids in school and ensure they get the best out of their time in the classroom.

“Climate change and food insecurity are the twin crises that may define Africa’s future,” said the World Bank’s Ademola Braimoh at the Wilson Center on September 13. One proposed solution is so-called “climate-smart agriculture” (CSA), an approach to farming that aims to mitigate the negative impacts of climate change while increasing agricultural production and income. But according to a panel of experts, smallholder farmers around the world have either been slow to adopt CSA practices or failed to sustain their usage over time.

Property and citizenship are in many ways what define us, and they interact in fascinating ways.

As the remains of nearly 60 buses smoldered at a depot in Bangalore, the “Silicon Valley” of India, protestors chanted, “We will give blood, but not Cauvery!” Downstream, in neighboring Chennai, at least 100 vehicles have been damaged, more than 500 people have been arrested, and a 25-year old died after setting himself on fire in protest.

Early on the morning of Sept. 29, according to India’s Defense Ministry and military, Indian forces staged a “surgical strike” in Pakistan-administered Kashmir that targeted seven terrorist camps and killed multiple militants. Pakistan angrily denied that the daring raid took place, though it did state that two of its soldiers were killed in clashes with Indian troops along their disputed border. New Delhi’s announcement of its strike plunged already tense India-Pakistan relations into deep crisis. It came 11 days after militants identified by India as members of the Pakistani terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed killed 18 soldiers on a military base in the town of Uri, in India-administered Kashmir.

Among all the countries receiving agriculture and nutrition assistance through the U.S. government’s Feed the Future initiative, Bangladesh receives the third most, at approximately $50 million a year ($55 million has been requested for 2017). Yet Bangladesh’s population is larger than that of the two countries ahead of it, Tanzania and Ethiopia, combined.