In sub-Saharan Africa, “more than half of the men under the age of 35 do not know their [HIV] status and are not on treatment,” said Dr. Sean Cavanaugh of the Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator at a recent Wilson Center event on engaging the faith community in reaching young men and boys with HIV prevention services.  Consequently, men often don’t seek HIV services promptly, decreasing their rates of antiretroviral therapy and viral suppression, and increasing HIV mortality rates.

“Globally, nearly one billion people still lack access to safe water,” said Sasha Koo-Oshima, Senior International Water Advisor for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, at a recent Wilson Center event on the potential challenges and opportunities of wastewater treatment. “In emerging developing countries, children lose 443 million school days per year due to diseases related to water, sanitation, and hygiene,” she said.

“The act of caregiving has unique impacts on women, in terms of economic, emotional, and physical well-being,” said Dr. Belén Garijo, the CEO for healthcare and executive board member of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, at a recent Wilson Center event.

“We cannot achieve our goals of ending maternal and child deaths without addressing critical health system barriers around the world,” said Grace Chee of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)’s flagship Maternal and Child Survival Program at a recent Wilson Center event. To improve the lives of mothers and children, health workers must address the underlying causes of poor health outcomes, including systemic weaknesses in health care governance, financing, and human resources.

“Some people are more vulnerable than others” to climate change, said Judy Oglethorpe, senior director of Multilateral Program Development of the World Wildlife Fund-US (WWF) at a recent event on climate change, biodiversity, and livelihoods. Oglethorpe is the chief of party for the Hariyo Ban (Green Forests) Program, which seeks to increase ecological and community resilience to climate change in two biodiverse landscapes in Nepal. Taking a “multi-scale approach let[s] us focus on the most vulnerable people,” said Oglethorpe, and “work at different scales and across different disciplines…to reduce people’s vulnerability.”

The effects of climate change on an abandoned U.S. nuclear project in Greenland could create not just environmental problems, but also disrupt military politics and spur diplomatic conflicts. My new article in Global Environmental Politics finds that climate change will eventually expose toxic waste, long immobilized by ice, at Camp Century, which the U.S. military left in the 1960s. This situation—which has already spurred the dismissal of Greenland’s foreign minister—could be the canary in the coalmine signaling that climate change will further complicate the already contentious politics of military bases.