“By 2050 the world urban population is expected to nearly double, making urbanization one of the 21st century’s most transformative trends.” -Draft “Quito Declaration on Sustainable Cities and Human Settlements for All,” September 2016

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.

“Climate change and food insecurity are the twin crises that may define Africa’s future,” said the World Bank’s Ademola Braimoh at the Wilson Center on September 13. One proposed solution is so-called “climate-smart agriculture” (CSA), an approach to farming that aims to mitigate the negative impacts of climate change while increasing agricultural production and income. But according to a panel of experts, smallholder farmers around the world have either been slow to adopt CSA practices or failed to sustain their usage over time.

The United Nations has made significant progress since the Stockholm Conference of 1972 in putting the environment on the global agenda. Indeed, the environment plays a major role in two of the largest UN initiatives today: the Paris climate accord and the Sustainable Development Goals. But in a new brief for the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Foundation, Wilson Center Fellow Ken Conca writes that the traditional approach to environmental issues is running up against its limits.

As the remains of nearly 60 buses smoldered at a depot in Bangalore, the “Silicon Valley” of India, protestors chanted, “We will give blood, but not Cauvery!” Downstream, in neighboring Chennai, at least 100 vehicles have been damaged, more than 500 people have been arrested, and a 25-year old died after setting himself on fire in protest.

By recognizing how closely connected the different aspects of sustainable development are, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) create an important opportunity – and challenge – for a more coordinated approach to implementing development policies.

Climate change is poised to remobilize hazardous wastes that the U.S. Army abandoned and believed would be buried forever beneath the snow and ice in Greenland.

Among all the countries receiving agriculture and nutrition assistance through the U.S. government’s Feed the Future initiative, Bangladesh receives the third most, at approximately $50 million a year ($55 million has been requested for 2017). Yet Bangladesh’s population is larger than that of the two countries ahead of it, Tanzania and Ethiopia, combined.