As Beijing prepares to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, China’s environmental activities are once again on center stage. The Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum took the top spot this month with Karen Mancl and Richard Liu’s coverage of the new program report, “Closing the Loop on China’s Water Pollution,” which details what China can learn from New York, Washington, D.C., and Singapore, to advance its wastewater and carbon reduction targets.

The U.S. Agency for International Development revamped its Water Office this spring, renaming it the Center for Water Security, Sanitation, and Hygiene, and adding it to the Bureau for Resilience and Food Security. In this month’s top post, Stephanie Cappa and Sarah Davidson highlight the importance of this shift for elevating water security as a central development issue, and call for increased attention and support to build more resilience and sustainability into food and water systems.

The same factors that make human trafficking victims vulnerable to trafficking can also exclude them from the very initiatives meant to protect them. In the case of the Dominican Republic, Haitian migrants—black, poor, and mostly men with an irregular immigration status—are more often viewed as criminals than victims of trafficking. In our top post this month, Jean-Pierre Murray explores the case of Haitian migrants, the risks they face, and why they’ve been overlooked.

Despite the fact that more than half of the professional health workforce are nurses and 90 percent of nurses and midwives are women, a strong gender bias still impacts women nurse’s decision-making power in the health sector. In this month’s most read article, Peter Johnson, a male nurse and midwife, challenges men both in and outside of the profession to do better in elevating the voices of women nurses and midwives and ensuring they have a seat at the table when decisions are made.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread and transform everyday lives, Rose Nzyoka and Vikas Dwivedi argue that using digital tools to improve systems to manage real-time data and decision-support systems could help the response to COVID-19. In our most read post this month, they propose five initiatives that ministries of health in low-and-middle-income countries need to focus on to limit the spread of COVID-19.

What is needed to close the billion dollar financing gap to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 6—ensuring the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all—by 2030? In our most read post of the month, Wania Yad, Amanda King, Kelly Bridges, and Thomas Boynton explore a range of financing approaches that can accelerate global access to water and sanitation. 

Indigenous women and girls are making significant contributions to global peace agendas through their traditional knowledge of natural resource management and valuable insights on how to cope with the negative impacts of climate change. In our most read post, Marisa O. Ensor highlights the importance of these “Unsung Sheroes” in moving global agendas forward.

The world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, China, is projected to fulfill its Paris commitment to reduce the proportion of coal in its energy mix ten years ahead of schedule. However, the country remains the world’s largest producer and consumer of coal, and coal conversion practices are steadily on the rise. In this month’s top post, China Environment Forum’s Richard Liu, Zhou Yang, and Xinzhou Qian track China’s risky gamble on coal conversion.