In the last several weeks, editorials by former U.S. national security professionals, particularly in The Washington Post and Just Security, argued for the need to expand the definition of national security in light of the coronavirus. Such expansion, they assert, should include climate change and infectious diseases like the coronavirus. Their pleas call for greater emphasis on human security in the national security discourse.

Gender is shaping the COVID-19 crisis in real and significant ways. Beyond the direct, visible practices that by now we all should understand—stay home, wash your hands, step back six feet—gender and its interactions with class, race, and immigrant status impact a number of dimensions of this crisis. From epidemiology to the vulnerabilities of front-line health workers, from the distribution of care work within families to the implications of quarantine for domestic violence, we need to reflect critically on these interactions to shape a truly effective policy response to this pandemic.

I saw plastic greenhouses as far as the eye can see from the train as I traveled across Shandong Province to visit the Shandong Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Ninety percent of the world’s plastic greenhouses are in China, covering 3.3 million hectares, about the area of Maryland, with the majority in Shandong.

As the humanitarian community responds to the Covid-19 pandemic, other long-term pressing priorities persist and require innovative solutions. The dry zone which extends across Central America encompassing parts of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua and a 10-year drought has left 1.4 million people in urgent need of food assistance. The impact of climate change, which includes extreme drought, poses an ever-increasing risk across Central America and contributes not only to food insecurity but also to migration issues that have plagued the continent in recent years.

The coronavirus pandemic has people throughout the world pondering how humankind should respond to a public health crisis. While individual countries are managing the crisis with varying degrees of success, we can all agree that the Covid-19 pandemic is commanding the international community’s attention. By contrast, it is much harder to get the world to care about the long-term public health crisis unfolding in the West African Sahel.

A suspect in the transmission of Covid-19 to humans, pangolins are the most trafficked animal in the world despite the ban on trade by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES). Currently on the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), pangolins are armadillo-looking mammals found in Asia and Africa but are more closely related to cats and dogs. Humans hunt them for their scales used in traditional medicine and the fashion industry and for their meat, which is considered a delicacy. Asian pangolins have become critically endangered, and poachers have turned to trafficking African species, most destined for China and Vietnam. According to TRAFFIC, a leading non-governmental organization working on wildlife trade, twenty tons of pangolins are trafficked each year, putting them on the fast track to extinction. 

The rhetoric of war is all around us during the Covid-19 pandemic, from the World Health Organization to historical takes. More critical assessments note that this war, like others, will hurt the most vulnerable. In a recent essay, feminist political scientist Cynthia Enloe takes issue with this rhetoric, pointing to the historic ways in which wars have led to “racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic practices.” Whether or not war rhetoric is helpful at this crucial moment, the current pandemic should be a wake-up call to expand what investments we consider essential to our national security, how we value work, and who gets called a hero.