From the parents on whom you depended in the first days after you were born, to the nurses who’ll likely become an ever more frequent fixture of your final years, care — and caregivers — are integral to all of our lives.

Whether it’s thanks to shouldering the majority of unpaid care work, or facing poor conditions in their roles as paid carers, women laboring in the care economy face serious threats to their health.

The Solomon Islands’ “commercially available forests will be gone in about 15 years” due to deforestation, said Lela Stanley, a Policy Advisor for Global Witness’ Asia Forests team at the Wilson Center’s recent China Environment Forum event. It looks like they are logging about 20 times faster than they should for the logging to be sustainable, she added. While timber from the islands is exported to China—the world’s largest importer and consumer of timber products—local residents and communities bear the brunt of the environmental cost of lost ecosystem services suffered at the hands of the timber trade. And they aren’t alone. China’s insatiable demand for raw materials and its harmful resource extraction practices wreak havoc on the ecosystems of its many producer countries.

At long last, my husband and I are empty-nesters. We have always worked in high-pressure jobs, and while the children were young, I put in plenty of non-work hours to care for them and for the household. My husband was unfailingly helpful, but now that our children are grown, I’m ready to renegotiate our “to do” list.

Fears of Central American caravans and Saharan smugglers keep European and U.S. leaders up at night. Desperate to manage migration, they turn to short-term fixes, which include blocking borders and supporting authoritarian leaders to contain people—their own citizens and others—before they get close to Europe or the United States. This bit of political theater appeals to some, but has limited effects in overall numbers. The long game consists of addressing root causes so people no longer feel compelled to move at all. But this too will do little to prevent migration north. If anything, it will encourage more people to move.

From the cultural hub of Lahore down to the bustling ports of Karachi, smog is king in Pakistan, with citizens enduring unhealthy air quality for much of the year. The smog, generated mostly by crop and garbage burning and diesel emissions from furnaces and cars, could get worse by the end of this year when Pakistan opens five new Chinese-built coal power plants, funded by a $6.8 billion venture under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) initiative. These five plants are just the beginning of the Pakistan government’s planned 7,560 MW expansion in coal power, which are CPEC-energy priority projects. “It’s a perfect storm for a pollution crisis,” said Michael Kugelman of the Wilson Center’s Asia Program. “The poor will continue to burn a variety of polluting materials to produce fuel, and now you’re also going to be introducing dirty coal into the mix. Combine that with crop burning in the countrywide and car exhaust fumes in rapidly growing cities, and you’ve got a really smoggy mess on your hands—and in your lungs.”

This year, 2018, marks the 60^th anniversary of a landmark publication by a pair of academic social scientists who first recognized the close relationship between population age structure (the distribution of a country’s population, by age) and development. In Population Growth and Development in Low Income Countries (Princeton U. Press, 1958), demographer Ansley Coale (1917-2002) and economist Edgar M. Hoover (1907-1992) theorized that eventual declines in fertility would transform developing-country age structures. Coale and Hoover demonstrated that these newly transformed age structures would exhibit larger shares of citizens in the working ages, and smaller shares of dependent children and seniors (Fig. 1). This transition, they argued, would someday help lift countries with youthful populations in Asia, Latin America, and Africa out of the low-income bracket.

For this World Cities Day, the UN’s theme calls for “building sustainable and resilient cities.” Cities across the Global South are assessing their physical preparedness against future shocks. Can cities that leave out—or often push out—poor workers claim resiliency? These moves are, in fact, weakening any preparedness. The foundations of truly sustainable and resilient cities lie in their residents’ abilities and agency.