For the past few years, much of my work as a journalist has focused on wildlife and environmental crime. I’ve covered poaching busts and seizures of everything from pangolin scales and big-cat skins to rhino horn, live turtles and songbirds. I’ve reported on the Asian, African and South American markets that sell animals live, dead and in parts, and about the consumers that drive this black-market trade. I’ve written about China, the largest consumer, where many endangered species products are luxury items bought by the wealthiest and most influential as a way to flaunt power and gain prestige. I’ve also explored the trade here in the United States — the world’s second largest consumer. I covered the ubiquitous bird trade in Latin America, where ownership of pet parrots and other birds is so rampant that few realize these animals are endangered, or that it’s against the law to buy or keep them.

“Floods are one of many factors that keep massive amounts of the population in poverty and always on the brink of disaster,” said Eric Viala at the second event in a four-part series on water security organized by the Wilson Center in cooperation with the Sustainable Water Partnership, which Viala directs. Panelists at the event discussed the impact of intense flooding on vulnerable communities and proposed innovative and collaborative approaches to reducing their risks in the face of disasters.

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.

Russia is “playing politics with energy supplies,” said U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson at a major policy speech at the Wilson Center this week. He accused Russia of wielding natural gas “as a political weapon” and said that ensuring European energy security was “fundamental” to U.S. national security objectives. In Europe, the debate is raging over how best to achieve energy security in the face of the twin challenges of Russian dominance and the need to decarbonize the economy. The ongoing securitization of Russian natural gas could not only complicate the road to a low carbon future in Europe, it could also undermine a European integration project that has mostly been a success.

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.

“Water may be the most important issue we face for the next generation,” writes President Donald J. Trump on the first page of the first-ever U.S. Global Water Strategy. Prepared by the U.S. State Department and released in mid-November, the landmark report was required by Congress’ bipartisan Senator Paul Simon Water for the World Act of 2014. During the public comments phase, the New Security Beat published recommendations from its fellows and experts. Now that it is out, we’ve asked them to share their thoughts on the final report.

$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.