As an agricultural engineering professor, I was excited to visit and tour the farm village Houbali, in southwestern Shandong Province. I found myself standing among newly constructed high-rise buildings, a vastly different community than I had expected to encounter. A bicycle repair shop was setting up alongside other bustling businesses in the first-floor storefronts. Farm families occupied apartments in the upper floors and a beautifully landscaped park and playground were a short walk away. This neighborhood looked like a transplant from Beijing, but these modern buildings were a newly developed farm village surrounded by agricultural fields. The new buildings brought together the residents of four old, nearly empty or “hollow” villages.

With rapidly aging populations and rising levels of female employment, the United States and other wealthy nations are facing unprecedented demands for non-familial care. These nations vary in their ability to address such demands. Those with more robust welfare states, including publicly supported, high-quality child care and elder care services and facilities, are generally able to meet growing needs for care, while those with weaker welfare states experience severe “care deficits,” leaving families with few alternatives. Increasingly, in the United States and elsewhere in the developed world, families are turning to migrants—usually women—to solve their care dilemmas.

In “Africa’s smallest war,” both Kenya and Uganda lay claim to Migingo Island, a tiny island in the waters of Lake Victoria. While the claims are over the island, the conflict is about something else entirely: Lates niloticus, also known as Nile perch, a tasty white fish that swims in the waters surrounding the island. The fish forms the backbone of the Lake Victoria economy but is increasingly hard to come by along the lakeshore. Catches are in decline, incomes are dropping, and the Ugandan government is taking increasingly harsh, militarized steps to help revive the fishery.

In September 2018, the Jinghu District People’s Court in Wuhu, Anhui Province sentenced 12 people from the Pol Shin Fastener Company between four months and six years in prison for committing serious interprovincial environmental crimes in Jiangsu and Anhui in 2016 and 2017. The court also fined the automobile hardware manufacturer 10 million yuan ($1.48 million). The crime? Dispatching ships and trucks to illegally dump 2500+ metric tons of highly acidic pickling sludge from steel production. Sludge—semi-solid waste emissions from industries and municipal water treatment plants—is yet another tough water and solid waste pollution challenge China faces.

In 2018, California experienced its most destructive wildfires in history. Satellite imagery shared by NASA scientists helped firefighters track fires and map damage by comparing satellite images documenting changes to the Earth’s surface. These types of images existed for decades but were classified for military purposes until the government program MEDEA identified their potential benefit and advocated for public access in the 1990s. According to former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) Chief Scientist and MEDEA member Richard Spinrad, “the systems that might be used for early detection of a missile launch may work equally well for detection of wildfires.”

“Caregiving for the young, elderly, sick, and disabled is a necessary part of human existence, but is often undervalued and excluded from policy agendas.” –The Juggling Act of Caregiving: Balancing Career, Health, and Gender Roles

In The Juggling Act of Caregiving: Balancing Career, Health, and Gender Roles, Sarah B. Barnes, Project Director of the Maternal Health Initiative, describes the role of, the trends surrounding, and the challenges associated with caregiving in the United States.