Although separated by a thousand miles, the women of the Malaysian state of Sarawak and the Filipino island of Mindoro are united by a major struggle: climate change. As rainfall patterns grow increasingly unpredictable, natural disasters become more frequent, and drought ravages once-arable land, women are on the frontlines in both communities.

Southeast Asia is one of the fastest growing energy markets in the world. Regional demand for energy may grow by as much as 80 percent and electricity demand more than triple by 2040. To keep up, governments are working to expand coordination across borders and create a broader regional energy grid (indeed their efforts predate their northern neighbors’ recent announcement of a “supergrid” by several decades).

The first baby conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF) was born in 1978 and revolutionized alternative family building strategies. As IVF has become more widely available in the years since, the focus of many families who cannot conceive or carry a baby to term – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates there are 6.7 million such women in the United States alone – has shifted from adoption to surrogacy. However, this endeavor remains very expensive; prohibitively so for many. Commercial surrogacy can cost up to $70,000 in the United States, except in the seven states where it is illegal. Yet if couples are willing to outsource to another country, surrogacy can cost much less.

In 2007, a teenaged Australian became the first documented case of “climate delusion” when he was hospitalized for dehydration after refusing to drink out of fear of contributing to the nation’s drought. Carley Chavara’s story on “climate trauma” was the most-read last month after being linked to by NPR.

Rivers have shaped the Western Balkan Peninsula’s characteristic landscape and played an important role in its history. Following the violence of the Yugoslav secession wars in the 1990s and the creation of six new nations, the number of transboundary river basins doubled from 6 to 13. In Kosovo, where independence remains a question, the water sector is a microcosm of tensions between ethnic Serbs and Albanians. The challenge of water resource management exists not only over the province’s contested national boundaries with Serbia, but between divided ethnic groups within the territory.

“The time for talk is done; it is now the time for action,” says Inger Andersen, director general of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), in an interview before the 2016 World Conservation Congress.

Women make up between 40 to 50 percent of the artisanal mining workforce in Africa compared to a world average of 30 percent, says Southern Voices Network Scholar Maame Esi Eshun in an interview with Wilson Center NOW. But despite the number of women in the sector, they are often relegated to the periphery when it comes to decision-making and leadership, undermining peacebuilding efforts in these areas.

In June 2010, The New York Times published a front page story trumpeting a Pentagon announcement of roughly $1 trillion worth of mineral resources in Afghanistan. Officials said the discovery was “far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself.” Then-President Hamid Karzai soon inflated the figure to $3 trillion and then again to $30 trillion, enough to transform the country into the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.”