Mayibout 2 is not a healthy place. The 150 or so people who live in the village, which sits on the south bank of the Ivindo River, deep in the great Minkebe forest in northern Gabon, are used to occasional bouts of diseases such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever and sleeping sickness. Mostly they shrug them off.

“This is a unique moment—a crisis that has demanded action for decades and is now getting the attention it deserves,” said U.S. Representative Lauren Underwood (D-IL-14) at a recent event on maternal health and disparities hosted at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health. The United States has the highest maternal mortality rate among high-income countries and for every maternal death, there are 70 “near-misses.” It is important to take a “life-course” approach to address this issue from a policy perspective, said Underwood.

Late last year, Reuters reported that the U.S. Defense Department plans to fund mining and processing operations for rare earth elements—a class of minerals for which China dominates the global market, producing over 80 percent of the world’s supply. In the past, China has restricted exports of rare earths, and recently threatened to do so again. Even with a phase one trade deal hammered out between the United States and China, natural resources are likely to remain a point of geopolitical tension.

“In 1959, he knew it was coming,” said Delbert Pungowiyi, a Yupik native of Savoonga, Alaska, on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea in an interview at the Wilson Center’s 8th Syymposium on the Impacts of an Ice-Diminishing Arctic on Naval and Maritime Operations. “He prepared me my whole life for this. It is a crisis.”

“We don’t have a world water crisis, we have a world water management crisis,” said Brigadier General Gerald Galloway (U.S. Army Ret.) at the 2nd National Drought Forum, hosted by the National Integrated Drought Information System and the National Drought Resilience Partnership at the United States Institute of Peace. The Forum brought together subject matter experts with federal and state leaders to discuss how to strengthen the state-federal relationship to improve U.S. drought readiness and resilience.

Every day 830 women around the globe die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes. Almost all of these deaths occur in the developing world, but over the past sixty years this global problem has made waves at home. While worldwide maternal mortality rates are decreasing, the rates are rising in three countries: Afghanistan, Sudan, and the United States. Between 2000 and 2014, the number of women who died in the United States from pregnancy-related causes while pregnant or within 42 days postpartum increased by almost 27 percent, from 18.8 per 100,000 deaths in 2000 to 23.8 in 2014.

The ongoing crisis at our southern border is exacerbating another, less visible, one—the crisis in elder and childcare in the United States. With baby boomers aging and more parents of young children working outside the home, our country’s need for non-familial caregivers is skyrocketing. Carework is growing five times faster than any other sector in our economy; in fact, it is set to become the largest paid occupation in the U.S. by next year. While US citizens are not keen to take these jobs, migrants, especially women, are. But the current bottleneck—not just at the border but throughout our immigration system—is slowing down the flow of these vital workers.