While traditional fuels likely will remain part of Africa’s energy portfolio for some time to come, the fossil fuel industry does face strong headwinds from a continuing global march towards alternative sources of clean energy. Indeed, the energy poverty experienced by nearly a billion Africans seems incomprehensible given the combination of massive untapped oil and gas resources, as well as available hydropower, solar and wind potential across the continent.

A window into what we’re reading at the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program 

Famine Prevention Systems Prove Insufficient (Reuters)

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (or IPC) is a global partnership that monitors hunger levels. It is widely recognized for its five-phase classification system of food insecurity that ranges from “minimal” (Phase 1) to “famine” (Phase 5). While the IPC’s aim is to inform humanitarian organizations at an early stage of a crisis to allow them streamline the flow of aid, the worsening global hunger levels experienced this year have pointed to shortcomings in existing prevention systems. 

“History teaches that China and the United States gain from cooperation and lose from confrontation” was part of the congratulatory note from Xi Jinping to President-elect Trump. Xi also stressed both sides should continue to uphold “mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation.” The cooperation between these two superpowers began in 1972 when President Richard Nixon and Premier Zhou Enlai signed the Shanghai Communiqué, years before they established diplomatic relations. 

This article is adapted from Vince Beiser’s “Power Metal” newsletter.

If you’ve heard anything about the dark side of the shift to renewable energy and digital tech—one of the main topics of my new book, Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future—you’ve probably heard about the children working in cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). That particular outrage has been covered by major international news outlets, human rights organizations and another recent book, Cobalt Red. But it turns out there are many other places where children, as well as enslaved adults, are producing the metals that go into our electric cars and cell phones.

Our present ecocrisis drives human insecurity. Single weather events killed hundreds in 2024, even in wealthy countries such as the United States or Spain. And beyond that staggering toll in human lives lurk staggering amounts of money required to repair and rebuild. In the United States alone, inflation-adjusted disaster-attributable costs have reached on average $153 billion each year. These factors and others make global environmental change a severe risk to human security.

Pronatalism, the push for women to have more children, has elbowed its way into prominence in public discourse. In the United States, cultural and institutional pressures on women to bear children are articulated in various ways, from negative portrayals of women who don’t consider having a child a viable choice for themselves, to a burgeoning Silicon Valley subculture that advocates having “tons of kids” to save the world, to policy proposals that would further restrict reproductive choice or limit the voting power of the childless. The stigmatization of people without children and the recent rise in contemporary pronatalism is a global phenomenon.