Girls and women bear the brunt of climate change impacts. Natural disasters kill more women than men: an estimated 90 percent of those killed in some weather-related disasters were female. The effects of climate change on natural resources can also further exacerbate existing gender inequalities.  Girls may be kept out of school to fetch water, as droughts drive them to walk farther and farther to find it. Seeking to stretch scarce household resources, families may marry off their daughters before the legal age and they may become more vulnerable to human trafficking after natural disasters.

The future of global security will depend in large part on the fate of today’s 1.2 billion young people. Do youth between the ages of 15 and 24—a critical phase of life—possess  the necessary social, physical, intellectual, and financial building blocks to underpin productive, healthy adulthoods? Or do they lack this solid base, putting them at risk of personal and social instability?

The United States currently faces an infrastructure crisis, as well as a growing climate crisis. Taking a sustainable approach to infrastructure could help address both problems, argued participants in a recent webinar conducted by the National Council for Science and the Environment, in partnership with the Security & Sustainability Forum. 

“It’s essentially an issue of a lack of viable alternatives,” said Quentin Wodon, lead economist for the World Bank’s Education Global Practice at a recent event on child marriage at the World Bank. “We have to create those alternatives.” Wodon co-presented the results of a new research study, “At What Cost? The Economic Impacts of Child Marriage,” by the World Bank Group and the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW).

“Investing in youth is a recipe for success,” said Elizabeth Dawes Gay, senior policy analyst at the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), during a webinar on June 22, 2017, organized by PRB’s PACE project on the connections between the population, health, environment (PHE) approach to international development, and achieving the demographic dividend.

In a June 12 speech to governments and NGOs at UNHCR’s annual consultations on refugee resettlement in Geneva, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi made a passionate plea for additional resettlement pledges from participating nations. He will likely be disappointed.

In 2016, the Environmental Protection Agency charged its federal advisory committee with exploring how citizen science and crowdsourcing should be integrated into the agency’s mission. The resulting report eloquently describes how if the environment is to be protected then it’s the duty of all – the government, institutions, and citizens – to work together to achieve this.

Pray for rain. Mega-drought. Winter salmon run nearly extinguished. Sierra snowpack dismal. These were just some of the headlines in California newspapers over the last five years during a historic drought that elevated water security to the top of everyone’s minds.