Environmental stress and climate change can accelerate instability and conflict—but shared environmental problems can also be a source of cooperation and facilitate peacemaking between states. Transnational environmental problems are common threats and often cross national boundaries, requiring international cooperation to address. In turn, this cooperation can provide a good entry point for building trust and cooperation.

In 1981, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen noted that “starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.” Sen was referring to the idea that hunger is not always related to food supply; even in places where ample food exists, many people do not have regular access to it. Yet, more than three decades later, research into the effects of agriculture on armed conflict is still focused much more on the former than the latter.

Forecasts of future climate conditions are fairly good, but forecasts of future socioeconomic conditions are another story. To get a sense of how climate change will impact society, many resort to simply layering future climate conditions on top of current socioeconomic conditions. That’s a mistake, write Wolfgang Lutz and Raya Muttarak in Nature Climate Change. “We see little value in the purely hypothetical exercise of assessing potential impacts of the future climate on a society that will not exist in the future.”

2016 was an eventful year for the continent of Africa, with important implications for U.S.-Africa relations. The Wilson Center’s Africa Program asked experts, scholars, and policymakers to weigh in on the most important and impactful events. This collection of essays reflects on those developments and their impact going forward.

Urbanization is changing the face of poverty and marginalization, and the maternal and newborn health field needs to change too, said a panel of experts at the Wilson Center on January 24.

Since becoming an independent nation in 1962, Uganda has struggled with high rates of poverty, regional and international conflict, and both endemic and epidemic disease outbreaks, particularly HIV/AIDS. In recent years, though, it has become a key partner of the United States. The U.S. government provides foreign assistance to improve the lives of Ugandans but also to advance stability in the East Africa region generally, with the bulk of these programs administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The United Nations Population Fund’s 2016 State of the World Population report calls for investment in a very specific demographic: 10-year-old girls. At age 10, young girls are at a “pivotal” stage in their lives, the report says. They face a world of limitless possibilities, yet far too many end up thwarted in their ambitions by sexual violence, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, child labor, and other “systematic disadvantages.”