The board of the United Nations’ lead organization on trade and development, called UNCTAD, released an assessment of Gaza’s development challenges during their annual meeting in Geneva this month and the news is not good. In 2012, the UN warned that a “herculean” development effort would be to keep pace with Gaza’s rapid population growth. Since then, more fighting with Israel has made things worse, particularly with regard to water and food security. Ninety-five percent of the water from Gaza’s coastal aquifer is unsafe for drinking without treatment, the report says. Contamination and over-extraction may even render it unusable by next year and damage may be irreversible if not addressed in the next five years.

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?