Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, humans have so vastly altered Earth’s systems that we’re now in the midst of what many are calling the Anthropocene Epoch. Human activity has become the dominant influence on climate and the environment, inflicting changes that may persist for millennia.

We are razing the planet’s last intact wild lands, degrading, deforesting, carving up, and destroying huge swathes of habitat. We’re overfishing and poisoning our rivers and oceans. We continue to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, raising CO2 levels and hastening climatic changes that are already affecting all life on Earth.

“Midwifery is a fix, it is not an add-on,” said Franka Cadée, President of the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM) at the Nairobi Summit on ICPD25. The World Health Organization designated 2020 the Year of the Nurse and the Midwife in recognition of the invaluable contributions of these two professions.  To meet the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, midwives and nurses must be valued and utilized as essential members of the health workforce.  Increased utilization of skilled midwives will also help countries achieve universal health coverage and improve access to sexual and reproductive health services, two key actions from the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD).

In the quarter century the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program has been pondering the issues for which it’s named, the world’s demographic future has been wobbling. A key concern of analysts: How many people will farmers need to feed in 2050? Mainstream projections have teetered between 8.9 billion and 9.8 billion, amounting to an increase of between 13 and 21 percent over today’s 7.7 billion. This significant variation in projections is rarely acknowledged by prognosticators. Many simply round up today’s latest guess and state confidently that there will be 10 billion people in 2050—though just a few years ago, the number most confidently stated was 9 billion.

Early scholarship on environmental peacemaking recognized the important role that local civil-society can play in promoting regional cooperation while, at the same time, pressuring governments to protect the environment. For example, in the late 1980s/early 1990s, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), such as the Union for Defense of the Aral Sea and Amu Darya in Uzbekistan and the Dashowuz Ecological Club in Turkmenistan, were at the forefront of the fight to restore the Aral Sea and protect the region’s biodiversity.

We’ve got a crisis impacting our mothers and a crisis impacting our babies, said Dr. Lisa Waddell, Senior Vice President of Maternal Child Health and NICU Innovation and Impact Deputy Medical Director at the March of Dimes, at a recent Wilson Center event launching the Maternal Health Initiative’s CODE BLUE series, developed in partnership with EMD Serono, a business of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany. She was referring to non-communicable diseases (NCDs), which impact maternal health in the United States and globally. NCDs kill 18 million women of reproductive age each year, accounting for two in every three deaths among women.

First published 30 years ago in the National Interest, Francis Fukuyama’s landmark essay, “The End of History?,” argued that, with the fall of fascism and communism, no serious blueprint for modern-state development lay open, save for those paths that would ultimately embrace both political and economic liberalism. Over the past two decades, movement toward this ideal end-state has trickled to a halt. Instead, the political elites of Eurasia’s regional powers—Russia, Turkey, Iran, and China—have crafted stable illiberal regimes that borrow whatever they need from free-market economics, electoral politics, nationalism, and religion. Their ascent has produced a form of “non-endpoint stability”—two mutually antagonistic camps: one composed of liberal democracies, the other a mix of illiberal hybrids. As long as these camps remain stable, the international system falls far short of Fukuyama’s theoretical end of history.

To address the security challenges facing Sub-Saharan Africa we need to shift the focus from a concept of state security to one of citizen security, says Ambassador Phillip Carter III (ret.), former Ambassador to the Ivory Coast and the Republic of Guinea, in this week’s Friday Podcast. “Our current strategy of a military response to terrorist organizations or criminal networks is inadequate at best, and probably unsustainable at worst,” says Carter. “To me, the greatest security threat in Africa is poor or bad governance.”