“Women and men face very different risks and challenges,” said Chitra Nagarajan, a writer and journalist who covers climate change, conflict, and gender. She spoke in this week’s podcast about what’s changed in the Lake Chad region. In the last few years the combination of profound climate change and high levels of insecurity have made life harder for the local population. To get a sense of how recent changes have affected Lake Chad’s residents, Nagarajan interviewed more than 250 people. These are some of her findings.

Climate change is widely recognized as a “threat multiplier.” From the United Nations to the G7 to the US Department of Defense, there is emerging consensus that climate change poses risks to both human and natural security through a variety of complex and interrelated channels. The extent of those risks, and how they connect to armed conflict, however, remain widely debated.

Humanitarian need is increasing. Crises are becoming more complex through the interactions between climate change, disasters, and conflicts. Not only are humanitarian crises on the rise, but the nature of crises is changing, largely due to climate change-driven extremes such as floods, droughts and typhoons. Over 90 percent of disasters are believed to be related to climate.

“I believe if you acknowledge women as primary users of environmental resources, if you draft the policy with women [at] the table, offering you their unique perspective and unique feedback, you’re going to have a more stable policy. A policy that gets implemented,” says Mishkat Al-Moumin, scholar in residence at the Environmental Law Institute, in this week’s Friday Podcast, and second in a series of interviews recorded at the First International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding.

In the years ahead, climate change and the proliferation of new technologies and information availability will require us to reshape our vision of shared waters. Because these megatrends are experienced in concert, the opportunities, challenges, and uncertainties for shared water management will continue to compound over time.

While it is impossible to know precisely how shared water will look in the future, we should already be working to expand how we conceptualize shared waters, address inequities embedded within water management, and develop criteria and processes that successfully identify and include non-traditional shared water actors in decision-making. These shifts will strengthen our ability to generate creative and sustainable management strategies and help us avoid water-related conflicts.