CHENNAI, India – T. Rajan tried all manner of entrepreneurial enterprises. He sold scrap paper and cardboard to recyclers. He built a street corner chai and cigarette cart, and repaired truck and bus tires. He started an office cleaning service for high-tech companies in the growing IT sector south of the city center. None of these delivered the financial returns and workday flexibility of selling clear, sky blue, 20-liter water “cans” in Chennai’s immense bottled water industry.

In 2000, the United Nations established the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) with the goal of creating a global partnership for development. The formation of the MDGs created a foundation for collaboration and encouraged cross-sector partnerships to reduce poverty but also promote issues like environmental sustainability and gender equality. To carry on momentum from the MDGs, 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were established in 2015 to further encourage partnerships between civil society organizations, the private sector, academic institutions, and more. Increased private sector engagement in development is a major goal of the SDGs – and we would argue that it is crucial to their success.

The epicenter of violence in the unstable country of Mali has historically been in the north, a contested region from where Touareg separatist and jihadist armed groups launched an insurgency against the state in 2012. But over the last two years, there has been a marked shift in communal and anti-state violence to the central region, and climate change may have played a role.

Almost three decades ago, at a conference at the Woods Hole Institute, oceanographer John Martin said with “a half a tanker of iron…I will give you the next ice age.”

Terrorist groups such as the Islamic State and Boko Haram have been dominating the headlines since 2013.  Both groups have gained international notoriety for their ruthless brutality and their rise is posing new challenges for national, regional, and international security. Such non-state armed groups (NSAG) are not a new phenomenon. Today, however, we can observe an increasingly complex landscape of violent actors with a range of hybrid organizational structures and different agendas that set them apart from “traditional” non-state actors and result in new patterns of violence.

Before the 2015 floods that drowned Chennai, Pradeep John spent several years posting thorough and dutifully accurate updates and alerts on Twitter and Facebook as the Tamil Nadu Weatherman. An amateur meteorologist who developed considerable expertise in weather data and satellite imagery, John’s online followers relied on his crisp forecasts and advice.

Recent rises in temperature and typhoon frequency and intensity have resulted in more internal migration in the Philippines, according to an article by Pratikshya Bohra-Mishra et al. in Population and Environment. The authors conclude that temperature change and natural disasters, such as typhoons, can have a significant effect on short-distance, sub-national migration because they reduce rice yields, which is used as a proxy for agricultural productivity.

As more climate change seems locked in – some estimates suggest a 1.5-degree Celsius (2.5 degree Fahrenheit) rise above pre-Industrial averages is guaranteed – more governments are allocating resources to adaptation. Caribbean communities that contribute very little to climate change are some of the most vulnerable, and representatives from many met in October 2016 in Grenada to share experiences and build technical capacity.