The ongoing conflict between the United States, Israel, and Iran imposes significant costs beyond the immense loss of life and destruction of vital infrastructure throughout the region. It also exacerbates the challenges posed by synthetic fertilizers, which play an essential but problematic role in feeding the planet.

The infrastructure powering artificial intelligence (AI) has become both a political flashpoint and a signal for strategic warfare with significant military, geopolitical, and international security implications. Climate change is a “threat multiplier” that exacerbates fragility. The collision of these two forces is certain to create immediate and long-term impacts. AI’s environmental footprint risks externalizing environmental costs onto poorer countries– and the communities within them–that supply critical minerals, water resources, and host energy-intensive infrastructure, deepening ecological, economic, and social inequalities. Over the long run, it may also undermine long-term climate resilience and global stability  

Devastating floods in Mokwa, a rural town in Niger State, claimed lives and destroyed homes and livelihoods in May 2025, and displaced many other residents as well. Yet, in Nigeria today, such flooding has become a predictable seasonal emergency. The real questions each year are not whether such floods will occur, but where they will happen—and if public institutions will act in time to prevent the next deluge from becoming yet another tragedy.

The US–Israeli war launched against Iran in 2026 may be remembered as the moment fossil-fuel dependence became more than a mere abstraction for the Global South. Brent crude quickly surged past $100 a barrel. Iran militarized the Strait of Hormuz (through which 20 million barrels a day, or a fifth of global oil consumption, normally flow) and retaliated against regional energy infrastructure. Qatar declared force majeure on its liquefied natural gas exports after Iranian drone attacks. Saudi Aramco’s Ras Tanura refinery shut down.

In March 2026, Earth League International (ELI) published a report: Money Talks: What Criminals Told Us About Corruption. Our study synthesized over a decade of intelligence obtained firsthand by ELI’s undercover investigators from inside criminal networks to examine how corruption facilitates environmental and wildlife crime, as well as how these activities converge with other serious crimes.

In the summer of 2025, Tehran almost reached “Day Zero” – a designation for the moment when the city’s municipal water supply was no longer able to meet basic demand through normal distribution systems. Indeed, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has repeatedly warned that the capital may need to be relocated due to the worsening water crisis.

Native nations in the United States have played leading roles in some of the country’s most spectacular conservation success stories. For instance, calls by the Yurok, Karuk and Hoopa Valley tribes resulted in the world’s largest dam-removal and salmon restoration project on the Klamath river in California and Oregon.  

This article was originally published on South Asian Voices, a publication of the Stimson Center.

“Do not give away Diego Garcia,” warned U.S. President Donald Trump on February 19, as the United Kingdom moved forward with plans to transfer sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius. While the Chagos Archipelago has often been viewed through the prism of the sovereignty dispute between the United Kingdom and Mauritius, the islands today serve as a fulcrum for regional rivalries and great-power competition.