Water sustains life on our planet. And access to clean and safe water is foundational to society. So why has it only been in recent years that water has risen to the top of discussions of climate and security? Richard W. Spinrad, the Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and NOAA Administrator, says that one of the biggest reasons is the major impact that climate-related changes in precipitation like droughts and extreme rainfall are having across the globe: “We’re starting to see things like we’ve never seen before. The nature of storms is changing: We saw five feet of rain fall in Hurricane Harvey. Five feet.”

The 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment marked a watershed in world environmental politics. Gathered in Stockholm, Sweden, the international community collectively recognized that the technologies and economic models that enable modern development were also driving unsustainable environmental degradation, compromising the vital natural systems on which human well-being depends.

We need minerals to build the solar panels, wind turbines, and other technologies that will decarbonize our economies—and we need a lot of them. The World Bank estimates that demand for lithium, cobalt, and graphite could jump by as much as 500 percent by 2050. Yet mining for these resources has had a fraught history, and it continues to be associated with a hefty list of human rights and conflict risks, including  violence, child labor, poor working conditions, land rights abuses, environmental damage and pollution, and a lack of community participation.

On a crisp autumn morning, the Yellow Hill Community Center in western North Carolina buzzed with excitement as more than 120 Cherokees and their allies shared conversations, laughter, and a hearty breakfast. They had descended upon the center in the Qualla Boundary on October 19, 2022 to mark the second annual Honor Long Man Day in the homelands of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI).

In recent years, the urgency of climate action has brought fresh attention to the critical minerals sector. Growing renewable energy investments are driving up demand for resources like lithium, cobalt, and copper, which form the mineral backbone of green technologies. But there are substantial concerns to navigate when it comes to sourcing green energy minerals.

Diplomacy between cities, counties, states and regions is critical to ensuring that diplomatic doors between countries are left open throughout changing political cycles at the national level. Such efforts are more important now than ever, especially for the climate crisis. As we head into COP27 with the message “from ambition to implementation,” cities have a critical role to play as the venues where many of the policies discussed at international climate negotiations will play out.

Secretary of State Anthony J. Blinken recently reaffirmed the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)—a nation located in Africa’s heart—as a “geostrategic player and critical partner” for the United States. It is a country that features prominently in climate change discussions, not only because of  its vast natural resources (including mineral wealth estimated to be the largest in the world, as well as possession of a forest cover second only to the Amazon Basin), but especially due to its cobalt reserves.

As the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the world in late 2019 and early 2020, the world’s great hope was in the rapid development and deployment of vaccines. Global public health organizations hoped to seize upon the crisis to advance international cooperative efforts to fight COVID-19, and the promise of advanced economies embracing “vaccine diplomacy” to get shots into arms around the planet was a key element in this strategy.