Early this June, the Israeli government cut off drinking water to people living in the Salfit region of the West Bank and three villages east of Nablus. The consequences have been dire. Thousands of Palestinians have been left with no running water in their homes, and factories have been forced to shutter. The power imbalance that leaves Palestinians so vulnerable to Israeli turns of the valve plays out every year, made possible by Israel’s occupation of the water-rich Golan Heights in 1967. What is perhaps most surprising is that the situation persists.

Heads of state gathered in New York for the September 19 United Nations Summit on Refugees and Migrants will reaffirm principles of international law, pledge to treat asylum seekers more humanely, and promise to improve coordination between humanitarian and development organizations.

Accurate measurements of wealth are useful for developing more targeted and effective poverty reduction programs. Unfortunately, such metrics are few and far between, as data on economic livelihoods tends to be expensive to obtain, and once collected, is often unreliable.

Featured side by side at the top of The New York Times home page recently were two stories: one on the United States and China, the world’s largest producers of carbon emissions, committing to a global climate agreement, another on how rising seas are already affecting coastal communities in the United States.

Most citizens of democratic nations expect their governments to do their very best to make society more egalitarian, productive, adaptive, and resilient. To do so requires governments to track not just today’s headlines but grapple with long-term underlying trends, like globalization and demographic change. Governments must also make assumptions about the future course of these trends and examine how they might collide or build on one another.

Picture your typical farm: Pigs, cows, chickens, goats…and tigers? This may sound far-fetched, but many iconic wild animals – including tigers, bears, and rhinos – are now farmed en masse in China.

An increasing number of conservation and health activists are beginning to understand the value of an integrated approach to development. Without addressing the needs of people, conservation measures will not be very effective, and conversely, without conservation, people lose vital natural resources and suffer consequences to their health.

A study published in PNAS highlights the unpredictability of the impacts of climate change on water resources by comparing detailed simulations in mountain areas of Chile and Nepal. Authors Silvan Ragettli, Walter W. Immerzeel, and Francesca Pellicciotti study the response of river flows to a significant decline in glacier areas in the Juncal catchment of Chile and the Langtang catchment of Nepal at higher spatiotemporal resolutions than any previous study.