While a great deal of focus on risks to women’s health just before and after giving birth centers on physical wellbeing, Rebecca Levine, Senior Maternal Health Advisor with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), observed that we may be missing a key part of the picture.

This article, by Sharon Guynup, originally appeared on Mongabay.

In August, I traveled aboard the icebreaker Kinfish to the Svalbard archipelago, north of the Arctic Circle. Invited to the bridge as we cruised fjords near the 80^th parallel, I was transfixed by towering blue glacier walls, but was confused by the map displayed on one of the ship’s screens. It showed our vessel sailing across a non-navigable frozen sheet.

We should be outraged by sexuality education’s colonialist connections. As a researcher and trainer based in the UK, I see how deeply blatant colonialist influences run in the field of sex education. The British empire was obsessed with the sexualities of their subjects and imagined their societies to be exotic licentious places where upper class British men could live out illicit fantasies. Yet, at the same time, these societies were deemed to be wells of immorality that needed Victorian moral education. These dual imaginaries were used to justify colonialism itself as a force to civilize non-western bodies and sexualities, and remain as ideas which echo in more contemporary discourses around controlling population and HIV.

Seeing Loreta sort and dry her Omena sardines at the shores of Lake Victoria in Western Kenya, one may dismiss this small, middle-aged woman as an ordinary fishmonger struggling to earn a living.

In 1972, environmental activists, government leaders, and industry experts met in Stockholm, Sweden, for the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm Conference) to plot out a new direction for international environmental governance. Over the ensuing 50 years, countries negotiated successful agreements to shrink the ozone hole and expanded protections for wildlife and ecosystems.

On the night of April 14, 2014, a group of militants attacked the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Nigeria. They kidnapped 276 female students, ranging from ages 15 to 19 years. An armed group called Boko Haram claimed responsibility for the kidnapping.

“One of the challenges of responding to climate risks is that climate’s impacts and how those impacts interact with existing systems on the ground are so varied and specific to a given place,” said Lauren Risi, Director of the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change & Security Program, at a recent PeaceCon conference panel on climate change, violence, and migration in Central America. “But there is also an opportunity in how we respond to develop more agile, just, and sustaining programs and policies that go beyond a singular focus on responding to climate change and instead build the overall resilience of communities.” 

“There is a growing recognition that climate change is going to affect security and it’s increasingly shaping peoples’ decisions about where to move, where to live, and how to plan their futures, but how migration, climate, and insecurity connect and drive risks is not always as clear cut as the headlines would have us believe,” said Cynthia Brady, Global Fellow and Senior Advisor with the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program, at last month’s International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding. The roundtable discussion, “Environmental Change, Migration, and Peace in Central America’s Northern Triangle” drew on the Wilson Center’s framework to improve predictive capabilities for security risks posed by a changing climate, developed in partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Applying the framework to the Northern Triangle—Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador—panelists discussed complex challenges and proactive approaches for building climate resilience and adaptive capacity.