The Columbia River basin—which spans four U.S. states, two Canadian provinces, and 32 Tribal Nations or First Nations—touches the lives of more than five million people each day. The basin’s 250 hydroelectric dams power everything from Google’s data center to irrigation pumps that spread water onto fields of alfalfa and potatoes. Steelhead trout and salmon rely on the river to spawn. Ships and tugboats transport millions of tons of cargo to and from the Pacific Ocean.

Last year, four rivers were granted legal rights: the Whanganui in New Zealand, Rio Atrato in Colombia, and the Ganga and Yamuna rivers in India. These four cases present powerful examples of the increasing relevance of rights-centered environmental protection. Like corporations, which have legal rights in many jurisdictions, these rivers are rights-bearing entities whose rights can be enforced by local communities and individuals in court. But unlike corporations, these rights are not yet recognized in international treaties. Which raises the question: what are the implications of rights for nature for international environmental law?

A quarter of the coal that powers China’s economy is mined in Inner Mongolia, one of the country’s most water-scarce provinces with only slightly under two percent of China’s total water resources. The coal-rich city of Ordos, which produces nearly 70 percent of all the coal in Inner Mongolia, is bookended by expanding deserts—Kubuqi to the north and Maowushu to the south—and may one day run out of water and face a “Day Zero” like Cape Town in South Africa. Both the central and local governments are promoting a number of efforts to create new water supplies in Ordos, such as treating brackish waters and trading water rights. To learn more, the China Energy & Environment Forum recently interviewed Shaofeng Jia, the Deputy Director of Water Resources Research Center at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who recently completed an extensive study on water-energy confrontations in Inner Mongolia.

Water variability is increasing “due to climate change and to more frequent natural disasters,” said Jonathan Cook, Senior Climate Change Adaptation Specialist with the U.S. Agency for International Development, at the fourth and final event in a series on water security organized by the Wilson Center and the Sustainable Water Partnership. To solve the problem of increasingly erratic water, “business as usual is really not acceptable anymore,” said Will Sarni, founder of WetDATA.org, who called for new, innovative ideas: “Hope is not a strategy.”

Iraqi Kurdistan is blessed with abundant water resources, but these resources are under increasing stress. Changing demographics, dam building in neighboring countries, and drought have driven Kurdish hydropolitics to a critical juncture where two distinct water futures are possible—and both have implications for regional stability and for U.S. interests.

Put simply, “the damn thing melted,” Navy Secretary Richard Spencer explained in recent testimony, referring to Arctic ice melt as the trigger for the new U.S. Navy Arctic Strategy that is to be released this summer. What the Navy planned as a 16-year road map is in need of updates after only four years, in part due to receding polar ice caps, which are “opening new trade routes, exposing new resources, and redrawing continental maps,” but also in part due to the rise of China as an “Arctic stakeholder” and increasing important player in the region.

In 2014, after losing a number of Somalian cities it had captured to African Union and Somali troops, the terrorist group Al-Shabaab changed its tactics. To demonstrate its continued power and presence, Al-Shabaab cut off water supplies to its formerly held cities. Residents from these cut-off cities were forced to fetch water from nearby towns, many of which Al-Shabaab controlled. But the terror group prevented anyone living in government-controlled territory from entering, which increased people’s frustration with the government.

Blockchain, the newest technology poised to revolutionize numerous industries, could help decentralize electricity systems across Asia, Europe, Australia and the United States. In Brooklyn, peer-to-peer microgrids allow prosumers—energy consumers who generate small amounts of electricity from renewable sources—to trade energy with other users. Blockchain technology provides distributed ledgers that validate, record, and share each transaction, using smart contracts that automatically execute energy trades when the price and volume of the electricity transaction meet the contracted requirements.