United States President Barack Obama invested four years and his top diplomats in containing Iran’s nuclear capabilities. He did this because an armed Iran is an existential threat to its neighbors, its region, and the world. Obama’s efforts in the talks stand in marked contrast to those geared toward addressing an even bigger and longer-term existential threat – containing climate change. The conditions that allow humans to survive, evolve, and thrive on earth are being compromised; radical changes in the climate promise a very uncertain future.

Scenario planning has a long history. The RAND Corporation employed it heavily in planning for potential U.S. responses to nuclear war and 16^th century Spanish Jesuit theologians pointed to the idea as proof of free will. But in many respects this powerful set of methodological tools for managing complexity and uncertainty remains underused, especially beyond the defense, intelligence, and business communities.

The board of the United Nations’ lead organization on trade and development, called UNCTAD, released an assessment of Gaza’s development challenges during their annual meeting in Geneva this month and the news is not good. In 2012, the UN warned that a “herculean” development effort would be to keep pace with Gaza’s rapid population growth. Since then, more fighting with Israel has made things worse, particularly with regard to water and food security. Ninety-five percent of the water from Gaza’s coastal aquifer is unsafe for drinking without treatment, the report says. Contamination and over-extraction may even render it unusable by next year and damage may be irreversible if not addressed in the next five years.

In the long term, improving maternal and child health is as critical to national security as any problem in Pakistan today, said a panel of experts including Minister of National Health Services Saira Afzal Tarar at the Wilson Center on September 9.

The Sundarbans – a collection of densely populated islands in India’s sprawling Ganges Delta – are so remote that the only way to get there is by boat. But human traffickers still manage to get in, and that’s left many families with missing daughters.

Many have noted inequality as fuel for conflict. It can serve to exacerbate grievances amongst those who have less within unequal contexts, which can in turn serve as a mobilizing factor in fueling violence. Alternatively, it can make the “prize” of conflict larger – within the most unequal societies, the poor have less to lose and more to gain.

Some of the world’s most crucial ecosystems can also be found in the most conflicted areas. The most progressive peace agreements in these circumstances sometimes include conservation protections, but fewer still include women – and that’s a an article in Peace Review by Conservation International’s Brittany Ajroud, Kame Westerman, and Janet Edmond.

Water is being used as a weapon of war on one of Syria’s deadliest battlegrounds, says the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and its local affiliate, the Syrian Arab Crescent, in a new video.