A study published in PNAS highlights the unpredictability of the impacts of climate change on water resources by comparing detailed simulations in mountain areas of Chile and Nepal. Authors Silvan Ragettli, Walter W. Immerzeel, and Francesca Pellicciotti study the response of river flows to a significant decline in glacier areas in the Juncal catchment of Chile and the Langtang catchment of Nepal at higher spatiotemporal resolutions than any previous study.

Rivers have shaped the Western Balkan Peninsula’s characteristic landscape and played an important role in its history. Following the violence of the Yugoslav secession wars in the 1990s and the creation of six new nations, the number of transboundary river basins doubled from 6 to 13. In Kosovo, where independence remains a question, the water sector is a microcosm of tensions between ethnic Serbs and Albanians. The challenge of water resource management exists not only over the province’s contested national boundaries with Serbia, but between divided ethnic groups within the territory.

“The time for talk is done; it is now the time for action,” says Inger Andersen, director general of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), in an interview before the 2016 World Conservation Congress.

The Nile River is shared by 11 countries, for which it is vital for food and energy production, freshwater, and as a means of transportation. Sharing the resources of the Nile has, however, been politically difficult. Recently, the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam has caused a major dispute with downstream Egypt which fears the dam will affect water flow in its own territory.

Near the corner of Broadwick and Lexington in London’s Soho neighborhood, a single spot on the ground has influenced more than 150 years of urban development. It’s the location of a water pump that in 1854 physician John Snow pinpointed as the source of contamination leading to a widespread outbreak of cholera in the neighborhood that killed more than 600 people.

With so much focus on global environmental problems, many may wonder how their region is faring more specifically. This is the sentiment behind the United Nations Environment Program’s process for the latest iteration of its flagship assessment, the Global Environmental Outlook 6 (GEO-6). [Video Below]

Most African states are more vulnerable and less prepared to address climate change challenges than the rest of the world. This observation is supported by a wide variety of sources, including the Climate Vulnerability Index and the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Index. And in fact Africans and their political leaders frequently observe that this crisis, manufactured in the developed world, disproportionately affects their continent. During a meeting of the African Union in 2007, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni called climate change “an act of aggression” by the rich against the poor.

Ten miles south of Tel Aviv, I stand on a catwalk over two concrete reservoirs the size of football fields and watch water pour into them from a massive pipe emerging from the sand. The pipe is so large I could walk through it standing upright, were it not full of Mediterranean seawater pumped from an intake a mile offshore.