Without warning, water rushed into a woman’s home on a raised platform above the floodplain of Bangladesh’s Teesta River. She was just a hand’s distance from her infant son, but she couldn’t stop him from falling into the floodwaters. “She can’t recover back from the trauma,” said the University of Dundee’s Nandan Mukerjee of the mother who lost her child to the currents of climate change.

The first U.S. city to host a docked bike-share system, Washington, D.C., is now home to a rapidly growing influx of dockless bikes, with five companies vying for the market. The docked system still accounts for 87 percent of the shared bikes in the United States, but the number of dockless bikes—which can be located by riders using an app and then left anywhere—is growing rapidly. The data from these location-enabled bikes provide a unique opportunity to measure the point-to-point transportation needs of millions of people in some of the world’s densest cities.

$1 billion sales in two minutes. More than 250,000 purchases every second. Singles’ Day, China’s annual retailing extravaganza, absolutely crushes Black Friday: E-commerce giant Alibaba raked in $17.8 billion in gross sales during last year’s event, more than double the combined total of $6.8 billion in sales during the United States’ 2016 holiday shopping kick-off. The shopping spree lasts only 24 hours, but its environmental impacts will extend for decades.

As the so-called Islamic State loses control over the areas it once occupied, it is leaving behind a toxic legacy.  The initial findings of a scoping mission undertaken by UN Environment Programme’s Conflict and Disasters branch found a trail of localized pollution that could have acute and chronic consequences for Iraq—and not just for its environment.

Six years of brutal warfare have destroyed basic infrastructure in Yemen, Libya, and Syria.  While U.S. and European governments have been largely preoccupied with providing immediate assistance and dealing with refugees, international humanitarian organizations—such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and Doctors without Borders—are focusing on how to repair, maintain, and safeguard the facilities that provide essential services like clean water, sanitation, and electricity.  Yet these efforts are hindered by lack of resources, protracted violence, and—most insidiously—by the warring parties’ intentional targeting of humanitarian actors and environmental infrastructure. Just as the extensive damage from hurricanes in the Caribbean and southeastern United States has underscored the need for more resilient infrastructure, the wars of the Middle East show that protecting infrastructure is key to protecting civilians caught up in conflict.

With air pollution causing more than one million deaths in 2015 and reducing the lifespan of citizens in northern China by three years, clean energy has become a top priority for China’s leaders. China tops the world in wind and solar power installations and the government plans to invest more than $360 billion through 2020 on renewable energy. But the green energy transition needs more than renewable power generation: Long-distance electricity transmission could play a key role in cleaning up China’s brown skies. Our recent study estimated that transmitting a hybrid of renewable and coal power through 12 new high-voltage transmission lines could prevent 16,000 deaths from air pollution exposure, and avoid 340 million tons of CO₂ emissions in China.

In 2011, a group of Hong Kong water activists and researchers traveled the length of the Dongjiang (East) River, which stretches from northeast Guangdong Province into Hong Kong’s New Territories, to investigate the challenges facing the watershed. The Dongjiang basin, which provides nearly 80 percent of Hong Kong’s water supply, has suffered water shortages due to the region’s increasing urbanization and industrialization. They found unchecked wastewater discharges—from agriculture, poultry farms, chemical plants, tanneries, and even an open-air quartz quarry—were dangerously degrading  water quality.