A steadily increasing global population, growing food demand, and changing climate necessitate new kinds of thinking in agriculture but also fields like public health and energy, concludes a new book, Hot, Hungry Planet, by former Wilson Center Public Policy Scholar and current Senior Fellow at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center Lisa Palmer.

TIRUNELVELI, India – Just after dusk on a warm mid-January evening, attorney DA Prabakar greeted several visitors on the dimly lit street in front of his home here in southern India. The air was desert-dry and dusty in this rain-scarce river city.

In a recent article for New Security Beat, Colin Walch made the case that the abandonment of some communities in Mali to deal with climate change on their own has created “fertile ground” for jihadist recruitment. In a similar argument, Katharina Nett and Lukas Rüttinger in a report for adelphi asserted last month that “large-scale environmental and climatic change contributes to creating an environment in which [non-state armed groups] can thrive and opens spaces that facilitate the pursuit of their strategies.”

In 1981, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen noted that “starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.” Sen was referring to the idea that hunger is not always related to food supply; even in places where ample food exists, many people do not have regular access to it. Yet, more than three decades later, research into the effects of agriculture on armed conflict is still focused much more on the former than the latter.

The implications for a warmer climate are many, but perhaps one of the most frequently overlooked is what it could mean for worker safety and productivity in certain sectors of the global economy.

CHENNAI, India – T. Rajan tried all manner of entrepreneurial enterprises. He sold scrap paper and cardboard to recyclers. He built a street corner chai and cigarette cart, and repaired truck and bus tires. He started an office cleaning service for high-tech companies in the growing IT sector south of the city center. None of these delivered the financial returns and workday flexibility of selling clear, sky blue, 20-liter water “cans” in Chennai’s immense bottled water industry.

The epicenter of violence in the unstable country of Mali has historically been in the north, a contested region from where Touareg separatist and jihadist armed groups launched an insurgency against the state in 2012. But over the last two years, there has been a marked shift in communal and anti-state violence to the central region, and climate change may have played a role.