During the 2016 campaign President Trump stated that clean water would be a top priority of his administration, telling ScienceDebate.org “it may be the most important issue we face as a nation for the next generation.” Now is the time to make good on that commitment.

In 2004 I was honored to be interviewed for The Lancet medical journal’s “Lifeline” series. I had just come away from a disastrous short tenure as the interim minister of health in Iraq following the 2003 war. I had support from former Secretary of State Colin Powell to rapidly mitigate and recover the war-related destruction of essential public health infrastructure and protections required as occupiers under Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Conventions that follow every war.

According to their recent Safeguarding the World’s Water report, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) invested $499,995,179 in water-related programming in 54 countries in 2015.

From 1990 to 2013, the notorious tiger poacher Kuttu Bahelia and his extended family – brothers, uncles, and their wives and children – reportedly killed hundreds of tigers and leopards in the tiger-rich Indian states of Maharashtra and Karnataka, according to law enforcement informants and media reports. “Even if half that [estimate] is correct, it is still a very significant number,” says Belinda Wright, who directs the non-profit Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI).

At a time when the relative influence of the United States is decreasing, and the relative influence of states is decreasing, we need a retooling of the architecture of U.S. foreign policy. Just as “personnel is policy,” it is also true that “organization is policy.”

In his dissertation, Tyler H. Lippert of the Pardee RAND Graduate School explains how the transboundary security impacts of climate change will both challenge and elevate the role of international multilateral institutions like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Whether or not we respond to climate change – and the security implications of that decision – is a major public policy question. But increasingly experts are paying closer attention to how we respond.

Do you experience information overload? Feel like there’s always another crisis to worry about? Sense a kind of chaos? Well, you may be a citizen of the early 21^st century.