Shenzhen sits in subtropical south China, where four-fifths of the country’s water resources flow. The monsoon brings heavy rains from April to September; at its peak, Shenzhen’s more than 7 million residents see pouring rain almost every day. So why is this city facing a serious water shortage?

Somewhere off the coast of Thailand, “ghost ships” bump and crash along the choppy waves scrapping the sea floor with nets that spare nothing. Pulling up these illegal hauls in shifts that sometimes last 20 hours are thousands of migrant fishermen, many of whom have been forced into indentured servitude or kidnapped. Far from shore on unregistered boats, they have little hope of escape and face daily abuse and squalid conditions. More recently, some captains have turned to trafficking Rohingya fleeing persecution in Myanmar, pressing some into service, extorting others, and taking sex slaves.

The World Economic Forum recently named water crisis the world’s number one risk for the next 10 years for its potential impact on people and industry. Indeed, as the global community grapples with climate change – and environmental change of all kinds – understanding the fundamental nature if water to human society is crucial. The input report for this year’s World Water Week, released yesterday by the Stockholm International Water Institute, in fact argues that getting water management right is a prerequisite for sustainable development.

President Obama’s recently announced Clean Power Plan – potentially a major turning point in the fight to contain greenhouse gas emissions and stop the slide toward an ever-warming Earth – is oddly both a courageous step in the right direction and codification of a process already underway.

If you’re a government pondering the development of newly discovered natural resources, how do you avoid the so-called “resource curse” – the tendency of high value extractive resources, like oil, gas, or minerals, to, instead of prosperity, bring corruption, entrenched poverty, and even violence?

Earlier this month, the United Nations released a final report on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the framework that has guided global development efforts for the last 15 years. The document examines each of the eight MDGs and finds that “despite many successes, the poorest and most vulnerable people are being left behind.” As one of the first global poverty reduction movements nears its end, the report calls for better data collection practices to create a post-2015 development agenda that can overcome the MDG’s shortcomings.