One of the primary ways climate change is expected to affect international relations is through water. There are more than 270 bodies of water that cross over international boundaries, and various methodologies have identified several dozen that are particularly at risk for tension or conflict. So how is climate change affecting transboundary water politics? Are governments and institutions taking the threat seriously? A few years back, a group of researchers decided to focus on this question.

In 1968, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich predicted hundreds of millions would starve to death over the next decade, many of them Americans, and the world would generally decline into chaos in his book The Population Bomb.

In a commencement speech at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy today, President Obama said “climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security, and, make no mistake, it will impact how our military defends our country.”

Among the few bright spots in the 2015 Freedom in the World Report, the brightest may be Tunisia, which for the first time was assessed as “free” – Freedom House’s highest “freedom status” and for many political scientists the definitive indication of a liberal democracy. Tunisia is the only North African state to have been assessed as free since Freedom House began its worldwide assessment of political rights and civil liberties in 1972, and only the second Arab-majority state since Lebanon was rated free from 1974 to 1976.

Depending on how closely you pay attention to the OECD, you may have picked up on a subtle but meaningful change in this year’s States of Fragility report. Whereas previous reports were titled Fragile States, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has shifted its framing to focus less on states and more on conditions, less on the binary status of a “fragile state” and more on fragility as a universal condition that can impede development in all countries.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Yemen has collapsed – again. A country that has split and been pulled together before, has the youngest and fastest growing population in the region, is running low on oil and water, and possesses a “personalist” government rather than stable institutions, was on the top of every expert’s list as the fragile state most likely to fail next.

In a headline–making article in the journal PNAS, Colin P. Kelley et al. write there is evidence that the ongoing conflict in Syria, which has killed at least 200,000, was triggered by climate change. Severe drought from 2007 to 2010 caused a massive rural-to-urban demographic shift which exacerbated pre-existing sociopolitical tensions in Syrian cities already inundated with Iraqi refugees.

The past decade has brought ground-shaking changes to global energy markets. The unconventional fuel boom has unexpectedly reduced U.S. dependence on oil imports, while in the Asia-Pacific region, energy-constrained nations are increasingly reliant on foreign sources to meet their soaring demand. With the U.S. slated to export liquid natural gas (LNG) to Asia as early as 2017, a new energy era has come.