The world needs strategic foresight now more than ever, and not just because of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Mounting climate crises across the globe underscore the need—blistering “heat domes” and extensive wildfires across the parched United States West, catastrophic floods of unprecedented scale in Germany and Europe, and more rain in just twenty-four hours in Zhengzhou China than typically falls over the course of an entire year. Scientists warn that for the first time, deforestation now threatens the capacity of the Amazon forest to absorb carbon dioxide. Foresight is no longer a luxury and climate change is no longer a distant threat.

Achieving Sustainable Development Goal 6.1 for safe, sufficient, and available water has always been important. Compounding challenges—from climate change and increasing migration within and across borders to COVID-19 and its multiple variants—makes achieving the human right to water more urgent. But what is often missed in discussions related to water access is that what determines access to safe and sufficient water is about more than gaps in governance or lack of funding—it is intertwined with entrenched inequality in societies, including the planning of urban spaces.

The recently released draft report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lays out in no uncertain terms that we face an insurmountable challenge in addressing climate change and its impacts. One shocking takeaway is that sea-level rise is now thought to be irreversible. Indeed, rising temperatures and changing weather patterns threaten to send some cities under water, while causing others to dry up. These opposing challenges increasingly threaten the lives and livelihoods of people in many countries as rapid urbanization is making cities even more densely populated. Floods and droughts threatening the world’s cities will force governments of the world to reevaluate the quality of their infrastructure, their disaster management strategies, and of course, their environmental footprints.

Currently there isn’t a lot of good news coming out of the Sahel, the area in Africa that borders the Saharan desert to the north, the Sudanian Savannah to the south, and stretches across the continent. Multiple raging insurgencies, especially in the western part of the region, fuel a news cycle of offensives and counter offensives, responses and massacres.

According to the damning new ‘code red for humanity’ report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the news from the region isn’t likely to get better any time soon.

On August 18, 2021, we witnessed a potential game-changer in the fight against international wildlife crime (IWT). One of the world’s leading wildlife trafficking hubs, Hong Kong, voted to change its laws to treat wildlife Crime as “Organized and Serious Crime.” From 2010 to 2020, local authorities valued wildlife seizures in the city at more than HK$1 billion (USD128.5 million), but the scale of the illicit trade passing through Hong Kong has likely been many times larger.

Climate change is no longer an abstract issue we may face in the future. Devastating forest fires, the hottest June on record in the United States, lethal flooding in Europe and Asia, and extreme droughts in Africa reveal that the climate is already changing with extreme consequences. Even more concerning than these events alone is the reality that the drivers of climate change, violent conflict, and fragile states compound each other. Climate change exacerbates unstable social, economic, and political conditions, while conflict and fragility can hinder effective climate change response and adaptation. The U.S. can address the compound risks created by both of these issues only through integration of conflict prevention and climate change in its foreign policy and development assistance.

As the world continues to battle the COVID crisis, we must not lose sight of the greatest long-term threat faced by mankind: climate change.

COVID-19 and its even more contagious variants have wrought misery upon our world, inflicting massive loss of life and sickness, widespread disruption of health services, and economic ruin with ensuing social upheaval. There is no silver lining.

We can, however, attempt to extract useful lessons from the strategies and tactics──both successful and unsuccessful──used to battle the contagion to better array our forces against that other pending global catastrophe: climate change.

On my first tour of a Cambodian minefield in 2010, the demining supervisor of the platoon of deminers brought me through a tapioca field where heavily armored men and women stood in lines. I was not allowed beyond the bright red signs with skulls and crossbones. Wearing bulletproof helmets, masks, and aprons, they slowly and tediously walked through the field, using a metal detector to sweep the ground in front of them, the sun reflecting off the long plastic visor. To avoid the heat of the Cambodian sun, they began their work early in the morning. In the golden hour of sunrise as dawn gilded the fields, the sounds of a distant Buddhist temple surrounded us with chanting. I commented on how beautiful it was.