Environmental stress and climate change can accelerate instability and conflict—but shared environmental problems can also be a source of cooperation and facilitate peacemaking between states. Transnational environmental problems are common threats and often cross national boundaries, requiring international cooperation to address. In turn, this cooperation can provide a good entry point for building trust and cooperation.

“The same criminals that are trafficking in drugs, guns, and people, traffic in wildlife,” said Christine Dawson, the director of the Office of Conservation and Water at the U.S. Department of State, at a recent event in the Wilson Center’s “Managing Our Planet” series. Experts from Vulcan Productions and Brookings Institution joined Dawson to discuss the links between national security and wildlife trafficking, which is now the fourth largest transnational crime in the world, and to mark recent legislative successes and innovative tools.

For the past few years, much of my work as a journalist has focused on wildlife and environmental crime. I’ve covered poaching busts and seizures of everything from pangolin scales and big-cat skins to rhino horn, live turtles and songbirds. I’ve reported on the Asian, African and South American markets that sell animals live, dead and in parts, and about the consumers that drive this black-market trade. I’ve written about China, the largest consumer, where many endangered species products are luxury items bought by the wealthiest and most influential as a way to flaunt power and gain prestige. I’ve also explored the trade here in the United States — the world’s second largest consumer. I covered the ubiquitous bird trade in Latin America, where ownership of pet parrots and other birds is so rampant that few realize these animals are endangered, or that it’s against the law to buy or keep them.

“Change is everywhere where snow leopards live,” said World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Vice President Kate Newman at a recent Wilson Center event. “The life of the snow leopard is intimately intertwined with the lives of the people in these high mountains,” she said. If you care about water security and climate resilience in Asia, you should also care about the integrity of the snow leopard’s habitat, added Koustubh Sharma of the Snow Leopard Trust. These beautiful and enigmatic animals are “the thermometers of the health of these ecosystems.”

As the so-called Islamic State loses control over the areas it once occupied, it is leaving behind a toxic legacy.  The initial findings of a scoping mission undertaken by UN Environment Programme’s Conflict and Disasters branch found a trail of localized pollution that could have acute and chronic consequences for Iraq—and not just for its environment.

Water is a “strategic instrument in the creation of a safer, healthier, more nutritious, less aggressive world,” said Winrock International President and CEO Rodney Ferguson at the first event in a four-part series on water security organized by the Wilson Center and the Sustainable Water Partnership. Panelists at the event identified innovative and integrated efforts necessary to increase global water security in the face of growing water scarcity.

From 1870 to 2015, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere  increased significantly, said Professor Maria Sanz, scientific director at the Basque Center for Climate Change in a recent webinar organized by WWF Forest and Climate. Forests have been responsible for global greenhouse gas emissions through forestry and other land use activities. However, she noted that forests also absorb nearly one-third of the emissions generated from fossil fuels.