A window into what we’re reading at the Stimson Center’s Environmental Security Program

Disaster Response Aid: Data Argues for New Focus on Inequality (Dialogue Earth)

When a 2019 oil spill and the COVID-19 pandemic struck coastal fishing communities in north-eastern Brazil back-to-back, researchers tracked 402 small-scale fishers across three states to assess the impacts. What they found was that fallout from these crises was were not uniform. The oil spill’s contamination of nearshore mangroves disproportionately harmed the women who make up the bulk of the workforce that harvests shellfish, while men fishing offshore for open-water species retained more of their income.

Devastating floods in Mokwa, a rural town in Niger State, claimed lives and destroyed homes and livelihoods in May 2025, and displaced many other residents as well. Yet, in Nigeria today, such flooding has become a predictable seasonal emergency. The real questions each year are not whether such floods will occur, but where they will happen—and if public institutions will act in time to prevent the next deluge from becoming yet another tragedy.

From Zambia to Indonesia, recent headlines about catastrophic toxic mining spills grimly underscore how the global push to secure one set of resources, critical minerals, might be compromising another: water.

“This isn’t just an environmental story,” said Lauren Risi, Director of the Stimson Center’s Environmental Security Program, at a recent event on protecting water resources amid increasing mining, held ahead of World Water Day 2026. “For many of these communities, the water being put at risk is their source of drinking water. It’s critical to subsistence farming and livelihoods. It sits at the center of daily life. When mining degrades or disrupts access to it, the consequences are immediate and personal,” she said.

In March 2026, Earth League International (ELI) published a report: Money Talks: What Criminals Told Us About Corruption. Our study synthesized over a decade of intelligence obtained firsthand by ELI’s undercover investigators from inside criminal networks to examine how corruption facilitates environmental and wildlife crime, as well as how these activities converge with other serious crimes.

A window into what we’re reading at the Stimson Center’s Environmental Security Program 

Experts Sound Alarm Over Peru-Brazil Biooceanic Railway Risks (Mongabay) 

A proposed railway linking Peru’s Pacific coast to Brazil’s Atlantic is drawing alarm from conservation experts and Indigenous rights advocates. Brazil and China signed a feasibility study agreement for new route crossing both the Andes and the Amazon rainforest in July 2025, with China playing a central role in financing and development. Two alternatives are under consideration, with one running through Peru’s Ucayali region and the other through Madre de Dios, but neither has been approved. A single line could impact 15 protected natural areas, threatening over 1,800 campesino communities, as well as territories inhabited by Indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation. 

A window into what we’re reading at the Stimson Center’s Environmental Security Program

Final Version of Global Critical Minerals Treaty Stripped of Traceability Measures (Mongabay)

At the seventh U.N. Environment Assembly in December 2025, Colombia and Oman jointly proposed a legally binding international treaty to create traceability and due diligence mechanisms across global mineral supply chains. Their proposal faced resistance from multiple countries including Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, Chile, and Uganda, and ultimately resulted in a watered-down nonbinding resolution on mineral governance that excluded traceability provisions entirely.

A window into what we’re reading at the Stimson Center’s Environmental Security Program

Community Forests Are the Frontline of a Minerals Race in the DRC (Mongabay)

In the Democratic Republic of Congo’s copper-cobalt belt, local communities are establishing community forest concessions to secure land titles and prevent eviction by mining companies. Sparked by previous displacement incidents, these concessions allow communities to hold up to 50,000 hectares in perpetuity. This region holds approximately 70% of the world’s cobalt reserves, which has attracted intense competition from Chinese companies, the United States, and the DRC state-owned Gécamines to obtain minerals essential to high-tech, weapons, and clean energy industries. Between 2001 and 2024, 1.38 million hectares of tree cover in Lualaba and Haut-Katanga provinces were lost due to mining activities.

A window into what we’re reading at the Stimson Center’s Environmental Security Program

Race for Copper Damages Protected Region in Colombia (Mongabay)

As Colombia looks to meet the growing demand for strategic minerals, activists working in the department of Choco allege that the country’s only industrial copper mine is harming both the environment and a local community. The El Roble copper mine has operated since 1990 at the base of a valley crossed by the Atrato River, but its acquisition by Canadian multinational Atico Mining in 2013 has meant that daily production has doubled from 400 to 1,000 metric tons over the past 12 years. El Roble also lacks the environmental license required by Colombia’s Mining Code, and continues to operate under a less stringent 1987 environmental management plan, which activists say omits required environmental impact studies.