Just outside Nampula, in northern Mozambique, a huge granite dome overlooks the city, 500 feet high and a half-mile across. All along its southern flank, hundreds of men work in small groups, whittling away at the rock face with sledgehammers and picks. Smoke rises before dawn until well after dusk, as they stoke fires to heat the granite and use crowbars to prize free tombstone-sized slabs. Day by day, the mountain is carted away by the wheelbarrow-full. It’s backbreaking work that yields barely enough to live. Yet these informal quarries are nevertheless among the region’s largest employers. Certainly, more people have found work here than with Kenmare Resources, the Irish company that has sunk more than US$1 billion into mining titanium deposits along the nearby coast.

In late 2017, I visited the several Rohingya refugee camps (Leda, Mainner Ghona, & Kutupalong-Balukhali Makeshift Settlements) in Ukhia Upazila (Cox’s Bazar District), Bangladesh. These camps are home to more than a million refugees escaping ethnic violence in Myanmar.

Natural bioshields—wetlands, forests, and urban green spaces—are critical tools for reducing the impacts of disasters on vulnerable communities. Between 1994 and 2014, nearly 7,000 natural disasters occurred worldwide, causing an average of almost 68,000 deaths each year. Climate change, growing populations, and widening economic inequality are all expected to increase the impacts of disasters. Bioshields—nature’s own solutions to natural hazards—can help protect people from these dangerous floods, storms, and heat waves.

Cape Town is running dry. But thanks to its sophisticated water management efforts, the city may ride out the crisis. However, other cities that lack these capacities are less likely to survive Day Zero. Especially in developing countries, where urban water services are often provided by informal or illegal actors, running out of water could have dangerous ripple effects for peace and security.

After pirates hijacked an Iranian fishing vessel last year near Bosasso, a major seaport in Puntland, Somalia, local authorities observed that the offending boat was casting nets without a license. While piracy has diminished since 2008-2012, when these waters became some of the most lawless in the world, a spate of incidents in 2017-8 has made it clear that the conditions that led to piracy—including incursions from foreign fishing boats—are still a major problem.

A recent article in Nature Climate Change has spurred a new chapter in the lively scholarly debate over the potential relationship between climate change and violent conflict. We agree with the article’s authors that there are several forms of sampling bias in this field, including how regions are selected for analysis. But simply addressing this sampling bias will not resolve many of the academic controversies that have raged since the mid-2000s. Our recently published study in International Studies Review examines the mechanisms connecting climate change or its consequences to violent conflict and concludes that to move this research agenda forward, researchers must pay deeper attention to the “nuts and bolts” that shape both climate-related conflicts and our understanding of them.

In 2017, four environmental activists were murdered every week on average—most of them in Latin America, and most of them targeted for protesting industries like logging or mining. These shocking numbers may finally start to taper off, if three new initiatives launched just this month are successful at protecting people’s right to a clean environment—and its defenders.

Recently, Nature Climate Change published a new study demonstrating significant sampling bias in the research that informs our understanding of whether climate change will accelerate human conflict. I was a peer reviewer of “Sampling bias in climate–conflict research,” and I wrote an accompanying “News and Views” piece summarizing it. I am fascinated by the issue of sampling bias; it’s perhaps the most consequential and least recognized form of bias in the social sciences, with potentially massive consequences for what we (think we) know about a host of phenomenon.