Since its adoption in December 2015, United Nations Security Council Resolution 2250 on youth, peace, and security has been hailed as the first of its kind to recognize young people as meaningful drivers of change through its explicit encouragement of youth leadership at all levels of conflict prevention and peacebuilding. “It’s a testament to the fact that global youth today can have a real meaningful impact on the big issues of today, in the big arenas where discussions are happening,” said Andy Rabens, a special advisor on global youth issues for the U.S. Department of State, at the Wilson Center on October 6.

The 2015 edition of the annual Vienna Yearbook of Population Research is a special issue on differential demographic vulnerability to climate-related disasters. Many of the 16 articles are worth reading, but here are 2 of particular interest.

On October 13, the United Nations General Assembly appointed Antonio Guterres as the next UN secretary-general. When the former prime minister of Portugal and high commissioner for refugees begins his term in January 2017, he will face a world of increasing climate and security crises. In a Wilson Center NOW interview and op-ed for The Daily Climate, Wilson Fellows Ruth Greenspan Bell and Sherri Goodman express optimism in Guterres’ ability to address these interconnected challenges and provide insight on the role of institutions like the United Nations in fighting climate change.

“Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time and it calls for a comprehensive and cooperative international approach like we’ve never seen,” said Jainey Bavishi, associate director for climate preparedness at the White House Council on Environmental Policy, at the Wilson Center on October 5. “The leadership of the island nations is essential; they punch well above their weight on this issue.”

If China is the globe’s most powerful manufacturing engine, the port of Shanghai is its fuel injection valve. This harbor is the world’s busiest, both in terms of tonnage and number of containers processed, allowing China to import the raw materials fueling its development and export the products that represent a significant share of the world’s economy.

A traditional conservation approach to climate change (e.g., habitat restoration, species protection) has been a primary tenet of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) agenda for decades. But this fall at the quadrennial World Conservation Congress in Hawai’i there were new discussions about tackling climate change in the context of national security and environmental peacebuilding.

In 1990, the U.S. Congress passed the Global Change Research Act “to assist the Nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change.” Under this mandate, the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) was born, an innovative, cross-cutting research initiative that brings together the science arms of 13 federal agencies working on global change issues, including the Departments of Agriculture, Interior, Energy, Defense, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and others.

Nestled in the mountains of western Sichuan Province sits the town of Piankou. Surrounded by three nature reserves that contain several hundred giant pandas, the landscape is undeniably beautiful. Rivers crash their way through rocky valleys framed by bamboo covered hills. But the scene was not always so tranquil.