In Bangdong Village, Yunnan, Matthew Chitwood wanted to do his part to keep the stunning mountainous area clean during his two-year residency as a China fellow at the Institute of Current World Affairs. One day he took his empty beer bottles to a local convenience shop for recycling, but the owners would not accept them. He was told to dump them over the embankment. Looking down the slope at the accumulated piles of broken furniture, soggy socks, food waste, and crushed soda cans entangled with plastic bags, Matt refused. Later, Matt’s friends flung his bottles into the gully. He related his frustrating recycling attempt to Mao Da, the founder of China Zero Waste Alliance, who told Matt that “rural trash management itself is a misnomer… It’s really just trash relocation.”

The polar regions of Antarctica and the Arctic have long captured the world’s imagination as seas and continents covered in unending ice. But the reality of the two regions is quickly shifting, with cascading consequences for the globe.

Simply put, without water there is no food. Global food and nutritional security require resilient agricultural systems, which, in turn, depend on reliable and sustainable supplies of freshwater, whether from rainfall or irrigation. It is an often-neglected dependency, and one that threatens to undermine our ability to meet our future food needs and maintain the ecosystems upon which all life depends.

Climate change will upend the 21^st century world order. It will redefine how we live and work, and change the systems of production, trade, economics, and finance. Even now, in the midst of a global pandemic, it is clear that climate change will be the defining issue of this century. In fact, COVID-19 has only underscored the inadequacy of our responses to global crises and heightened the urgency of this call to action. 21^st century diplomacy will have to raise climate ambition, shape the transformative systems change needed, and promote and facilitate new modes of multilateral collaboration.

By the end of 2020, Turkey’s long awaited Ilisu dam project will be complete. Turkey argues this new dam will bring power independence and shore up economic stability. As an added bonus, it ensures water resiliency in a water-scarce region. Meanwhile, environmentalists bemoan habitat destruction, and Iraqis worry about water shortages they will experience down river. For the Kurds, the Ilisu dam project wipes out thousands of years of culture. For them, it’s the latest in a methodical cultural extermination which has been their plight since the founding of the Republic of Turkey.