“The same criminals that are trafficking in drugs, guns, and people, traffic in wildlife,” said Christine Dawson, the director of the Office of Conservation and Water at the U.S. Department of State, at a recent event in the Wilson Center’s “Managing Our Planet” series. Experts from Vulcan Productions and Brookings Institution joined Dawson to discuss the links between national security and wildlife trafficking, which is now the fourth largest transnational crime in the world, and to mark recent legislative successes and innovative tools.

Water is a “strategic instrument in the creation of a safer, healthier, more nutritious, less aggressive world,” said Winrock International President and CEO Rodney Ferguson at the first event in a four-part series on water security organized by the Wilson Center and the Sustainable Water Partnership. Panelists at the event identified innovative and integrated efforts necessary to increase global water security in the face of growing water scarcity.

From 1870 to 2015, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere  increased significantly, said Professor Maria Sanz, scientific director at the Basque Center for Climate Change in a recent webinar organized by WWF Forest and Climate. Forests have been responsible for global greenhouse gas emissions through forestry and other land use activities. However, she noted that forests also absorb nearly one-third of the emissions generated from fossil fuels.

Despite sharing a common element—water—the freshwater community and the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) community have traditionally worked independently of each other, said Jimmiel Mandima, director of U.S. government relations at the African Wildlife Foundation during a recent webinar organized by USAID-supported Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group (ABCG). However, that is starting to change: “Integration will bring value addition and synergy,” he said.

CHENNIMALAI, India – There is river and beach sand aplenty in Tamil Nadu. At 130,000 square kilometers (50,200 square miles), the state is about the same size as Nicaragua and has 95 rivers with sandy bottoms and a long Bay of Bengal shoreline. Or did. For almost all of its thousand-year history, the state of Tamil Nadu took all that sand for granted. No longer.

The state of the global environment is terrible – and deteriorating. The globalization of industrial production and the consumptive habits of 7 billion people have created the Anthropocene, a geologic age in which the actions of humans are the primary determinant of the Earth’s natural systems. This shift creates a profound new form of environmental interdependence, of which climate change is only the most salient example.

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.