While the pangolin’s thick overlapping scales protect it from predators such as lions, this animal is an easy mark for illegal wildlife traffickers. Image courtesy of the Tikki Hywood Foundation, Zimbabwe.

Acting on a tip, Nigerian customs operatives raided an apartment in the southwest city of Ikeja in February. Inside, they found some 4,400 pounds of pangolin scales, and 218 ivory tusks—and arrested a Chinese suspect, Ko Sin Ying, who lived there.

A few months earlier, at the other end of a well-worn trade route, Chinese customs officials made the largest-ever seizure of pangolin scales in the port of Shenzhen. They discovered an “empty” shipping container that had come in from Africa—stuffed with 13 tons of scales. They were packaged in bags that camouflaged their true contents beneath a veneer of charcoal. That haul had killed an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 animals, each about as big as a medium-sized dog.

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.

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.

On Wednesday, June 21, 2017, authorities in Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei warned residents to prepare for a storm that could trigger flooding and possibly landslides. Flood warnings have become all too common in China: In 2013, more than 230 Chinese cities experienced floods. But Mother Nature is not entirely to blame; the cities’ outdated drainage systems are quickly overwhelmed and sprawling concrete gives stormwater runoff no place to go.

In 2016, the Environmental Protection Agency charged its federal advisory committee with exploring how citizen science and crowdsourcing should be integrated into the agency’s mission. The resulting report eloquently describes how if the environment is to be protected then it’s the duty of all – the government, institutions, and citizens – to work together to achieve this.

In 2012, the U.S. National Intelligence Council judged that within the next 10 years, water problems would be a major contributor to instability in “many” countries that are of interest to the United States. South and Southeast Asia, with its many transboundary river basins, large populations, and geopolitical flashpoints, is one among a number of hotspots where such instability could occur.

In a world rapidly churning out unpredictable political shocks, intelligence analysts occasionally need to clear their heads of the daily barrage of newsworthy events and instead work with simple theories that discern the direction and speed of trends and help predict their outcomes. Political demography, the study of population age structures and their relationships to political trends and events, has helped some analysts predict geopolitical changes in a world that, from time to time, appears utterly chaotic.

As climate change leads to more weather variability and natural disasters, the need for adaptation is more urgent than ever. The Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative (ND-GAIN) aims to enhance understanding of adaptation and inform the public and private sectors on actions and investments.