From Ukraine and the Middle East to sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia, the world is engulfed in a series of significant international crises. But despite such urgent issues, it would be a grave mistake to forget about the structural foreign policy challenges – such as access to water – that could become the crises of the future.

Nearly 1 billion people lack reliable access to clean drinking water today. A report by the Water Resources Group projects that by 2030 annual global freshwater needs will reach 6.9 trillion cubic meters – 64 percent more than the existing accessible, reliable, and sustainable supply. This forecast, while alarming, likely understates the magnitude of tomorrow’s water challenge, as it does not account for the impacts of climate change.

The fight for control over “the most dangerous dam in the world” is raging.

Since its capture by Islamic State (IS) militants on August 7 and subsequent attempts by Iraqi government and Kurdish forces to take it back, Iraq’s Mosul Dam has been one of the central components of the government’s surprising and rapid collapse in the country’s northern and western provinces. In fact, one might see the capture of the Mosul Dam as the moment IS ascended from a dangerous insurgent group to an existential threat to Iraq as a state.

Under international law, someone who flees their country because of conflict or persecution is a refugee, but someone who flees because of inability to meet their basic household needs is not. In the case of Somalia, it is increasingly difficult to make any meaningful distinction between the two.

Since the end of World War II, a number of the world’s most dramatic political events have resulted from demographic shifts and governments’ reaction to them. Despite this, political demography remains a neglected topic of scholarly investigation.

As global environmental change accelerates, understanding how population dynamics affect the environment is more important than ever. It seems obvious that human-caused climate change has at least something to do with the quadrupling of world population over the last 100 years.

Asia is going through an unprecedented wave of urbanization. Secondary and tertiary cities are seeing the most rapid changes in land-use and ownership, social structures, and values as peri-urban and agricultural land become part of metropolitan cityscapes. All the while, climate change is making many of these fast-growing cities more vulnerable to disasters.