The original version of this article, by Autumn Spanne, appeared on The Daily Climate.

Five hours by truck and mule from the nearest town, a rumbling generator cuts through the silent night to power large spotlights as botanists crouch and kneel on large blue tarps spread across a cow pasture. It’s nearly midnight, and the team works urgently to describe every detail of the dozens of colorful orchids, ferns, and other exotic plants they have collected that day in Las Orquídeas National Park, one of the single most biologically diverse places on the planet.

“We are at a critical juncture in human history, which could lead to widely contrasting futures,” writes the chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC) Christopher Kojm in the council’s latest forward-looking quadrennial report, Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, released yesterday.

This year, principal author Mathew Burrows and his colleagues focus on a series of plausible global scenarios for the next 20 years and the trends or disruptions that may influence which play out. Among the most important factors in these projections are demography and the environment.

“There is as much of that water on the planet today as when the first amphibian flopped ashore; as much as when the ancient Greeks divined the future in the babble of brooks,” writes William Wheeler in The Christian Science Monitor. “So why do experts in science, economics, and development warn that a ‘global water crisis’ threatens the stability of nations and the health of billions?”

Five million people die each year due to climate- or carbon-related causes, and total mortality by 2030 could total 100 million people, according to new report from DARA, a nonprofit organization that works to improve aid to those affected by conflict and climate change and quantify the global cost of climate change and carbon use. But the report has drawn some fire for being too alarmist.

The original version of this article appeared in NATO Review.

Few regions are more environmentally insecure than South Asia.

The region faces rising sea levels and regularly experiences coastal flooding – of particular concern in a region with heavily populated and arable-land-rich coastal areas. Additionally, it is highly vulnerable to glacial melt. The Western Himalayas, which provide water supplies to much of South Asia, have experienced some of the most rapid melt in the world.

While climate change will undoubtedly have an impact on societies throughout the world, researchers are still debating whether or not it will cause conflict. John O’Loughlin, Frank D.W. Witmer, Andrew M. Linke, Arlene Laing, Andrew Gettelman, and Jimy Dudhia use a quantitative approach to tackle some of “sweeping generalizations” that have come to characterize this debate in a new study, “Climate Variability and Conflict Risk in East Africa, 1990-2009,” published last month in PNAS. They found that while there is “no statistically significant relationship” between precipitation and conflict, increased heat is correlated with more conflict in East Africa. Still, they also found that other factors, like population size and the space-time lag for violence, predict conflict more reliably than either of the climate-related elements.

“During my career, my viewpoint changed significantly in the understanding and definition of what security really is,” said retired Admiral William J. Fallon at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on November 2. “My current appreciation of it is that it’s much more fundamental, much more personal, much more at the individual human level than I had thought in earlier years.”

“When I embarked on this series, I approached it as an environmental reporter: What does a growing number of us and growing consumption mean for our planet?” said Los Angeles Times reporter Ken Weiss at the Wilson Center on October 9. Weiss, along with photographer Rick Loomis, recently completed a five-part series and multimedia presentation on global population that was the culmination of a year of research and travel through more than six countries. [Video Below]