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

The World’s Children Face the Most Severe Impacts from Wildfire Smoke (Mongabay)

Evidence of the alarming impacts of wildfire smoke on child health is growing. Children’s developing lungs, faster breathing rates, and greater outdoor exposure make them uniquely vulnerable, and the threat is intensifying as wildfires grow more extreme, incinerating not just forests but urban areas, releasing toxic heavy metals and chemicals. 

The Dot-Mom column of the Environmental Change and Security Program’s New Security Beat blog serves as a platform for diverse perspectives and insights from global experts in maternal and global health, gender equality, and peace and security. In 2024, the Dot-Mom column, hosted by the Wilson Center’s Maternal Health Initiative, was marked by an incredible number of guest contributor articles.

“When babies are born early, they actually are not prepared to be in an environment that’s below [the temperature] of the human body, and they have to start pulling calories to be able to keep their body temperature at 37 degrees Celsius,” said Dr. Ann Hansen, a neonatologist at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Boston Children’s Hospital and Founder of the Global Newborn Solution during a recent event held in commemoration of World Prematurity Day. “To keep them in what we call a thermal neutral environment, they need to have an external heat source.”

In August 2013, Josephine Majani, a mother of three from Bungoma County in Kenya, endured a harrowing birth experience. Despite her repeated pleas for help during labor, the nurses in the hospital ignored her. She struggled to walk to the labor ward while in intense pain, but all of its beds were occupied. Majani was forced to give birth on the cold concrete floor. Subsequently, nurses there subjected her to verbal and physical abuse—even making her carry her placenta back to the labor ward.

Over the last four decades, contracting HIV has been transformed from a fatal diagnosis to a manageable chronic illness. Political will and financial commitments have reduced new HIV infections worldwide by 39 percent since 2010. However, much work still is needed to meet global targets of preventing new cases of HIV and reducing AIDS-related deaths. Marginalized communities, including women and girls, face countless barriers which hinder progress towards comprehensive HIV prevention across the planet.

Pronatalism, the push for women to have more children, has elbowed its way into prominence in public discourse. In the United States, cultural and institutional pressures on women to bear children are articulated in various ways, from negative portrayals of women who don’t consider having a child a viable choice for themselves, to a burgeoning Silicon Valley subculture that advocates having “tons of kids” to save the world, to policy proposals that would further restrict reproductive choice or limit the voting power of the childless. The stigmatization of people without children and the recent rise in contemporary pronatalism is a global phenomenon.

A window into what we’re reading at the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program 

Over 40,000 Protest for Maori Rights in New Zealand (Al Jazeera) 

Earlier this month, the libertarian ACT New Zealand party introduced the Treaty Principles Bill in that nation’s legislature. The controversial measure seeks to reinterpret the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi—a foundational document that granted Maori tribes broad land rights in return for ceding governance to the British. The treaty’s historical value remains significant to this day, and it is a contemporary reminder of the colonial injustices faced by the country’s native tribes.