“The United States should maintain a unique leadership role in global food security,” said former Senator Richard Lugar at a recent Center for International & Strategic Studies event, “The U.S. Global Food Security Strategy: Progress, Setbacks, and Forward Momentum,” which marked the one-year anniversary of the passage of the Global Food Security Act. Signed into law on July 20, 2016, the act required the interagency Feed the Future initiative to develop the first-ever U.S. Global Food Security Strategy.

Organized crime, arms and drugs smuggling, and conflict often overlap with environmental crimes like illegal fishing. A new interactive database from the Stimson Center’s Environment Security program maps incidents of illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing with the aim to “illuminate and educate on the geostrategic security implications of environmental crime; foster the creation of a new and expanding community of natural security stakeholders; and change the terms of the conversation on environment crime, leading to innovation policy solutions.”

“It’s essentially an issue of a lack of viable alternatives,” said Quentin Wodon, lead economist for the World Bank’s Education Global Practice at a recent event on child marriage at the World Bank. “We have to create those alternatives.” Wodon co-presented the results of a new research study, “At What Cost? The Economic Impacts of Child Marriage,” by the World Bank Group and the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW).

In 2015, Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina received the United Nations Champion of the Earth award for her “outstanding leadership on the frontline of climate change.” One of the world’s most populated countries, Bangladesh is also one of the least developed and most vulnerable to climate change. While Bangladesh is well-known for the natural calamities that regularly leave millions of people homeless and displaced, far fewer know that it is also one of the most proactive countries in the fields of disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate adaptation, as well as a leading voice among the poorest countries in climate negotiations.

“Interest in earth observation—and in particular, the value to what we do in development internationally—has never been higher,” said Jenny Frankel-Reed, adaptation team lead at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Frankel-Reed spoke at the Wilson Center’s recent panel discussion of the earth observation data program known as SERVIR, which included insights from USAID’s soon-to-be-released evaluation of the program.

At the G20 Summit in Hamburg early July 2017, leaders of the world’s strongest economies issued a joint statement reaffirming their commitment to the Paris Climate Accord. President Trump—the lone outsider—had announced in early June he would withdraw the United States from the agreement. As China doubles down on meeting its Paris targets, the chasm between the world’s two largest emitters and energy consumers continues to widen as previous joint efforts to curb carbon emissions fade away. Post-summit headlines focusing on the “G19” nations suggest America has abandoned international cooperation against climate change. But some U.S. cities and states are continuing the climate fight with their Chinese counterparts.

Capable of upending rural livelihoods, compromising institutions of governance, and inducing new patterns of migration and crime, global water stress has emerged as one of the principal threats to U.S. national security, said David Reed, senior policy advisor at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and editor of WWF’s new book, Water, Security and U.S. Foreign Policy, on June 27 at the Wilson Center. Four defense and development leaders – retired U.S. Marine Corps General James L. Jones; Paula Dobrianksy, vice chairwoman of the National Executive Committee of the U.S. Water Partnership; retired U.S. Navy Admiral Lee Gunn, vice chairman of the CNA Military Advisory Board; and Kristalina Georgieva, chief executive of the World Bank – joined Reed for a panel discussion of water’s central role in global stability and prosperity.

Sea-level rise will put approximately 13 million coastal Americans at risk of displacement by 2100, but the first to move will be the most vulnerable communities. In Reaching Higher Ground: Avenues to Secure and Manage New Land for Communities Displaced by Climate Change, Wilson Center Global Fellow Maxine Burkett and her coauthors look at Native American communities on the frontlines of climate change as a model for how vulnerable coastal communities can successfully relocate. Currently, there is no central mechanism within the federal government for relocating communities displaced by climate change. Federally recognized Native American communities have historically coexisted alongside the United States government as sovereign entities, and their many avenues – legal, policy, and corporate – to acquire land could provide a starting point for addressing this imminent challenge. The authors identify tools communities can use to secure new homes and preserve their ownership of evacuated lands.