Pakistan is just one of 142 countries that has signed on to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), but is arguably the flagship partner among the group. BRI is an infrastructure investment project and aims to bring between $1 to $8 trillion dollars in development initiatives to global railways, highways, power plants, hydropower dams, and ports under the BRI umbrella. However, since the two governments formalized the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a framework of infrastructure connectivity, there have been strong concerns from the Pakistani public about the social and environmental costs of Chinese investment. 

“Most of the people living here are helpless,” said a woman in Jaffna, a district of northern Sri Lanka, nearly ten years after the country’s civil war ended. It was 2017, and I was conducting research with women in two villages in Jaffna. This woman’s sentiment reflected the challenges many in her community are still facing, including the ability to access health services. Through this research, my colleagues and I found that women’s access to healthcare was influenced by both their gender—particularly gender norms and gender roles—and household income. Better understanding of how gender and gender dynamics impact healthcare access will be essential to improving their lives. 

Gender issues, climate change, and security problems are interconnected in complex and powerful ways. Unfortunately, some of these connections have not received enough attention from scholars, policy analysts, and policymakers. This has serious, real-world implications for the promotion of gender equality, the mitigation of climate change, and the advancement of peace and security—three priorities that everyone should care about.  

Human rights have been central to the family planning movement for well over half a century, although family planning programs have not always lived up to the human rights commitments that governments publicly subscribe to. The right of couples to control their fertility was first codified in the 1968 Tehran Declaration, which noted that:

“Parents have a basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children.”

Some people falsely believe that the Afghanistan takeover by the Taliban during a drought increases the risk of violence over shared waters such as the Helmand and Kabul Rivers. Violent clashes over scarce resources have been predicted as “likely,” or even “certain” for 35 years, and despite such “water wars” never having happened, hypotheses about them keep cropping up around conflict-affected regions such as the Middle East and South Asia. In reality, conflicts are multidimensional with social, political, economic, and ecological drivers producing conflicts through their complex interrelations. Because of these multidimensional conflict drivers, the water war message is wrong-headed and needlessly scaremongering.

Deteriorating security in Ethiopia, a country W.E.B. Dubois once described as where “the sunrise of human culture took place,” is deeply concerning. The last few months have seen a dramatic involution for a country that was once a poster child for sustainable development. The conflict between the government and rebel forces in Tigray is not just a matter of regional security, but a significant blow to the world’s efforts to fight climate change.

Environmental security notions have evolved over the past 30 years. Once a sub-field of Security and Peace Studies focusing on how environmental issues correlate with modern security theories and policies, the concept is rapidly merging environmental and security sectors. Former Greek Naval Officer in the Hellenic Navy and current environmental security scholar Dimitrios Kantemnidis’ expertise sits at the center of the two merging fields. His military background informs perspectives on growing environmental security risks and potential responses for civilian and military actors.

Almost two years after Cyclone Idai hit Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi, thousands of people remain displaced. At the time, Idai was the most powerful cyclone to hit the Southern Hemisphere in two decades, but it is no longer an anomaly. Worse, the Word Bank reports that climate change can potentially wipe out decades of social and economic progress in the developing world by displacing millions of people, many of whom will be pushed into poverty. Food and water insecurity connected to climate hazards—particularly in places dependent on agriculture—is a major factor which has forced families and whole communities to relocate for safety and subsistence.