The population of unpaid family caregivers is shifting, and the pandemic has accelerated that change. One in five carers became caregivers for the first time during the pandemic, according to the Embracing Carers Global Carer Well Being Index®. A disproportionate share of these new carers were Gen Z or millennial (less than 38 years old). And 25 percent were caring for children and a sick/aging parent or grandparent.

Over 79 million people are currently forcibly displaced within their own country or across international borders as a result of conflict or natural disaster. As Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, explained in 2020, “resolving forced displacement is not only a moral or humanitarian imperative, but also deals with issues at the heart of the [Security] Council’s mandate to maintain international peace and security.”

How should the international community support the stabilization of Afghanistan after U.S. and NATO troops withdraw? Answers from President Biden, high ranking U.S. administration officials, and lawmakers have focused on funding the Afghan military and police and remotely retaining U.S. lethal capacity. Development aid is mentioned only in the vaguest of terms. But as withdrawal plans solidify, peace and resilience against insurgencies urgently require the administration to shift the focus to development and include support for local environmental governance. Looking at how crucial forests are to Afghanistan’s local economy and governance systems, we sketch the resource-conflict links and propose possibilities for local, environmental governance that the international community could support to quell insurgency and build the political, economic, and environmental foundations for peace in the country.

Last April, Vice President Kamala Harris visited the Upper San Leandro treatment plant in Oakland, her Californian hometown. The American Jobs Plan, she told her constituency, will deliver over a hundred billion dollars for the upgrade of U.S. water supply infrastructure. In truth, the investment plan, one of the largest in a generation, is far more ambitious than that. Across all proposed expenditures, it includes not just the upgrade of all water piping, but also remediation, flood protection, ecosystem restoration, and the climate proofing of economic activities. All these initiatives place water at the heart of recovery and resilience.

After enduring sexual violence in the DRC conflict, Steven Kighoma fled to Uganda where he became an activist with the NGO, Men of Hope Refugee Association, supporting male victims of conflict-related sexual violence. The experiences of male victims include rape, being forced to watch family members being raped, being beaten on the genitals, and enduring other kinds of abuse. Compounding their trauma, men who have suffered sexual violence in the region are often seen as not properly masculine and face homophobic violence and criminalization, regardless of their sexual orientation. In addition, they face exclusion from survivor support services which assume that only women face sexual violence.

The biggest challenge is “the ignorance of the government, the medical institutions, the community, not knowing a male victim of sexual violence exists,” says Kighoma. “There is a confusion when you talk about male victims of sexual violence. People confuse it with homosexuality.”

Over the past decade, our understanding of how climate change affects conflict and security has advanced considerably. Yet, how to best address the overlapping challenges of climate change, conflict, and human security remains an open question. In an article published in World Development, I address this topic by examining how climate security discourses inform development policy and, in turn, how the structures of development enable or constrain institutional capacity to address climate security. This research identifies not only the unique barriers the development sector must overcome, but also the ways in which the most common framings of climate change (i.e., as a threat multiplier) limit the scope for policy and programming.

Attempts to reduce the amount of waste flowing into the ocean from Indonesia are having limited success.  

Smog, water pollution, deforestation and desertification—for decades, citizen activists and protestors have attempted to fight the environmental impacts of China’s development and industrialization. Now, confronted with climate change, the Communist Party of China (CCP) is well aware not only of citizen discontent, but also of the risks that climate change poses to the long term security, stability, and survivability of the regime. Rising seas will affect the great cities of Shanghai, Tianjin, and other areas along China’s coast. Glacier melt on the Tibetan Plateau will cause floods in the short term and in the long run fail to replenish the falling aquifers of the thirsty North China Plain. The prospect of high numbers of displaced Chinese citizens, internally displaced by global warming, is real.