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.

In June 2016, the government of the Chinese city of Xiantao cancelled an incineration project following protests by residents who felt they were not adequately consulted before the project was approved. As growing Chinese cities produce more construction and consumer waste, incineration projects have increased—along with widespread protests of their environmental and health consequences.

A looming industrial tower of pipelines and chemical storage tanks rises out of snowy landscape. In Novogorodske, a small quiet town in eastern Ukraine, workers go about their daily business at the Dzerzhinsk Phenol Factory. A penetrating, inescapable smell greeted us as we entered the village, which a Dutch journalist and I are visiting as part of our investigation into the environmental and health risks from ongoing fighting in Eastern Ukraine. Our research for the open-source collective Bellingcat has identified the factory as one of a number of potential environmental flashpoints.

“Globally, nearly one billion people still lack access to safe water,” said Sasha Koo-Oshima, Senior International Water Advisor for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, at a recent Wilson Center event on the potential challenges and opportunities of wastewater treatment. “In emerging developing countries, children lose 443 million school days per year due to diseases related to water, sanitation, and hygiene,” she said.

Plastics. From the devastating effects of plastic pollution on our oceans, to the news that plastic bottles likely pollute the drinking water they contain, plastic pollution—the theme of this year’s Earth Day—has been a highly visible issue, and we’ve seen some notable progress on fighting the plastic battle.  

In 2014, we met with some of the technical leads of a major Chinese river basin authority in Beijing and asked them whether they were more worried about pollution or climate change impacts. Both, the engineers replied. Pollution affects us every day, they said, but changes in the climate erode our ability to supply drinking and irrigation water, manage floods, and generate electricity.

China must address its environmental and climate change challenges, such as reducing water pollution and building resilience to droughts, floods, and long-term climate shifts. But existing sources of finance have not met the growing demand for environmental projects.

The effects of climate change on an abandoned U.S. nuclear project in Greenland could create not just environmental problems, but also disrupt military politics and spur diplomatic conflicts. My new article in Global Environmental Politics finds that climate change will eventually expose toxic waste, long immobilized by ice, at Camp Century, which the U.S. military left in the 1960s. This situation—which has already spurred the dismissal of Greenland’s foreign minister—could be the canary in the coalmine signaling that climate change will further complicate the already contentious politics of military bases.

As the so-called Islamic State loses control over the areas it once occupied, it is leaving behind a toxic legacy.  The initial findings of a scoping mission undertaken by UN Environment Programme’s Conflict and Disasters branch found a trail of localized pollution that could have acute and chronic consequences for Iraq—and not just for its environment.