Where violent conflict displaces people and disrupts societies, maternal and child health suffers, and such instability is widespread today. According to the UN Refugee Agency, there are 65.3 million forcibly displaced people, 21.3 million refugees, and 10 million stateless people over the world. In addition, more than 65 million people who are not displaced are affected by conflict.

As Syria has collapsed, spasming into civil war over the last five years, the effects have rippled far beyond its borders. Most notably, a surge of refugees added to already swelling ranks of people fleeing instability in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and sub-Saharan Africa, leading to the highest number of displaced people since the Second World War. At the same time, scientists have noted record-breaking temperatures, a melting Arctic, extreme droughts, and other signs of climate change. For some, an obvious question is: what does one have to do with the other?

Record levels of displacement and accelerating climate change have prompted many to wonder if the world is headed toward a more violent future. The nexus of climate change, migration, and conflict is posing fundamental challenges to societies. But not always in the ways you might think. In a new report prepared for the U.S. Agency of International Development, Lauren Herzer Risi and I present a small guide to this controversial and consequential nexus of global trends.

It was some point in May last year, shortly after ISIS surged into the city of Ramadi, and I was working on a story about Iraq’s fast-disappearing Mesopotamian Marshes. Keen to fact-check a few statistics with the Ministry of Water Resources and to hear the government line on the wetlands’ struggles, I dialed its Baghdad offices. After being passed from official to official like a hot potato, a young employee, Hussein, finally gave it to me straight. “No, no, we don’t have this sort of information,” he said, clearly impatient to get off the phone. “There are much more important things in Iraq right now.”

The United Nations Environment Program is highlighting the battle by Iraqi forces to reclaim Mosul from the Islamic State as the latest instance in the complex but very real linkage between military conflicts around the world and extreme environmental degradation.

Since its adoption in December 2015, United Nations Security Council Resolution 2250 on youth, peace, and security has been hailed as the first of its kind to recognize young people as meaningful drivers of change through its explicit encouragement of youth leadership at all levels of conflict prevention and peacebuilding. “It’s a testament to the fact that global youth today can have a real meaningful impact on the big issues of today, in the big arenas where discussions are happening,” said Andy Rabens, a special advisor on global youth issues for the U.S. Department of State, at the Wilson Center on October 6.

The world is undergoing a period of demographic transition which presents both opportunities and challenges for governments. A report by the Atlantic Council’s Mathew Burrows, formerly of the National Intelligence Council, Reducing the Risks from Rapid Demographic Change, examines the changes in population structures across high-, upper-middle-, lower-middle-, and low-income countries.

On October 13, the United Nations General Assembly appointed Antonio Guterres as the next UN secretary-general. When the former prime minister of Portugal and high commissioner for refugees begins his term in January 2017, he will face a world of increasing climate and security crises. In a Wilson Center NOW interview and op-ed for The Daily Climate, Wilson Fellows Ruth Greenspan Bell and Sherri Goodman express optimism in Guterres’ ability to address these interconnected challenges and provide insight on the role of institutions like the United Nations in fighting climate change.