To further its goals to strengthen the global economy, China has already invested $300 billion of its pledged $1 trillion towards its Belt and Road Initiative—a massive infrastructure investment plan that spans 60 countries across Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. China’s initiative will shift the world’s political, environmental, and economic landscape.

Just days before the 2016 Summer Olympics began in Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian city faced an unsavory problem: how to handle its overwhelming sewage. Nearly half of Rio’s municipal wastewater flowed untreated into Guanabara Bay, where the waters were so polluted by sludge that direct contact was deemed a health hazard to Olympic athletes.

“The demand for water will not be linear,” said Vice Admiral Lee Gunn (USN-Ret,), currently vice chairman of the CNA Military Advisory Board, at a recent Wilson Center event on water and security. As people’s quality of life improves, “the demand for water will increase as well. And so the stresses that we already see around the world—the arguments over basin rights for water, the depletion of water in major cities around the world—we think will aggravate problems that already are beginning to manifest themselves,” he said.

Every year, millions of shorebirds migrate to the Arctic to breed—some coming from as far away as Australia and New Zealand—and then head back again. Nearly all of the birds making this journey spend time in the food-rich intertidal mudflats of the Yellow Sea ecoregion, on the east coast of China and the west coasts of the Korean peninsula. But as China’s economy has grown, around 70 percent of the intertidal mudflats in the Yellow Sea area have disappeared—the land drained and “reclaimed” for development. All of the more than 30 species of shorebirds that rely on the mudflats are declining, and those that stop there twice a year are declining at a faster rate than those that stop only once. If the current trajectory continues, the Yellow Sea—once known as the cradle of China—will become the epicenter of extinction.

I pulled my horse to a stop along the banks of a little stream, which was wedged between two grassy hills speckled with wildflowers and pika holes, to admire the view of the Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau’s rolling hills evolving into snowcapped mountains.

As senior military officers, we see water stress—the lack of adequate fresh water—as a growing factor in the world’s hotspots and conflict areas, many of vital interest to the United States. Our earlier reports have identified a nexus among climate, water, energy, and U.S. national security. We have previously shown how emerging resource scarcity across this nexus can be a threat multiplier and an accelerant of instability. With escalating global population and the impact of a changing climate, we see the challenges of water stress rising with time. It is in this context that we now seek to provide a better understanding of the mechanisms through which water factors into violence and conflict.

“Water security and management represent the cornerstone of global conflict prevention,” said President Danilo Türk, chair of the Global High-Level Panel on Water and Peace and former president of Slovenia, at a recent Wilson Center event on water and peace. “The only alternative to water is water, and therefore, the matter of water is a matter of survival,” said Sundeep Waslekar, president of Strategic Foresight Group.

“The same criminals that are trafficking in drugs, guns, and people, traffic in wildlife,” said Christine Dawson, the director of the Office of Conservation and Water at the U.S. Department of State, at a recent event in the Wilson Center’s “Managing Our Planet” series. Experts from Vulcan Productions and Brookings Institution joined Dawson to discuss the links between national security and wildlife trafficking, which is now the fourth largest transnational crime in the world, and to mark recent legislative successes and innovative tools.