In July 2019, more than 100 child sex trafficking victims were rescued across the United States. In 2018, Columbian authorities saved more than 80 Venezuelan women and girls from sex trafficking, and later that year, 40 trafficked Ugandan women were saved in Thailand. These individuals were among the 5 million victims of sex trafficking worldwide.

The security implications of climate change emerged as an important area of concern in the mid 2000s in both policy circles and academia. Since then, there has been much research exploring causal pathways between climate phenomena and violent conflict, often with inconclusive or mixed results.

When I arrived at Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar in July, the infamous monsoon was well underway. The rain was intense, roads were muddy, and it was very difficult to move around. Cox’s Bazar—the closest big town to the Rohingya refugee camps—is now the base city for most of the humanitarian agencies working with the refugees. The distance between Cox’s Bazar and Kutupalong Camp—the world’s largest refugee camp—is barely 30 kilometers. However, due to the rain and the area’s hilly terrain, it seemed like it took ages to get there.

While most people killed in wars are male, several studies have found that “mortality among women in some high-intensity conflicts was as severe as male mortality,” said Henrik Urdal, the Director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), at a recent Wilson Center event on the links between maternal and child health, aid, and armed conflict. “Maternal health is a very natural place to start” when researching excess mortality and indirect deaths among women impacted by war, said Urdal.

Last month, a major multinational military exercise launched in South and Southeast Asia. The Pacific Partnership is the largest annual multilateral humanitarian assistance and disaster relief preparedness mission conducted in the Indo-Asia-Pacific and aims to enhance regional coordination in areas such as medical readiness and preparedness for manmade and natural disasters. At its center is the hospital ship USNS Mercy, with an international team of civilian and military specialists seeking to build response capacity in one of the most disaster-prone regions of the world.

Hurricanes Irma and Maria devastated Puerto Rico, leaving many on the island without power, drinking water, or cellular service. Such disasters are not just an issue for the Caribbean, said the Wilson Center’s Roger-Mark De Souza in an interview with WOUB that was last month’s most read story on New Security Beat. All coastal areas of the United States, with their growing populations and vulnerable but valuable infrastructure, should be prepared to face more severe climate-related natural disasters.

Myanmar’s inter-ethnic disputes undermine an otherwise favorable backdrop for a peaceful democratic transition, write Rachel Blomquist and Richard Cincotta in New Security Beat’s most read story last month. Their analysis was published in April 2016, but it presciently foreshadows the current crisis. Through their multi-dimensional assessment of the demographic tension in Myanmar, the authors show that “[t]he path to democracy seems to cut directly through the Rohingya issue.”

Floods have taken the lives of more than 100 people in northern Bangladesh over the last two weeks. Fully one third of the country has been flooded and some 600,000 people have been displaced in the riverine nation as a result of monsoons in India and Nepal. At international climate forums, Bangladeshi diplomats consistently decry such disasters as part of their urgent calls for action to mitigate changing weather patterns worldwide. But here in the country’s Rangpur-Kurigam region, both authorities and citizens have been reluctant to attribute these deadly disasters to the effects of climate change.