“Water is the frontline of climate change. It’s what every report that you see identifies as the sort of first and foremost effect we see from a climate changing world,” said Sherri Goodman, a public policy fellow at the Wilson Center and formerly of CNA and the U.S. Department of Defense, on October 19.

A recent report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warns that over the next 15 years, climate change will add to the number of people living in poverty via its effects on the agriculture and food sectors. By 2030, climate-related effects on food-related livelihoods could lead to an additional 35 to 122 million impoverished people, according to the 2016 State of Food and Agriculture Report.

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.”

Over the past four years, I have been a member of the Resilience Academy, an initiative of the United Nations University, International Center for Climate Change and Development, and Munich Re Foundation bringing together thinkers from 29 countries to gather insight on climate change resilience and “loss and damage.” Loss and damage has many definitions, but broadly refers to the impacts of climate change that cannot be addressed via adaptation (adjusting to the effects) or mitigation (preventing them from happening at all).

In a recent paper published by Climatic Change, Nick Obradovich conducts the “first-ever” investigation into the relationship between rising global temperatures, electoral returns, and climate change. Using data from more than 1.5 billion votes cast across electoral contests held in 19 countries, he found that when the annual average temperature for a country rose above 70°F, there was a “marked” decrease in the number of votes received by incumbent officeholders.

As the international community meets in Marrakesh for the climate change negotiations at COP-22, one of the most delicate issues on the table is the review of what’s called the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage, or WIM.

Since the end of World War II, the number of wars between states has declined significantly, but the number of intrastate civil conflicts – as seen in Syria and Afghanistan – has increased.

What happens when melting ice reveals buried nuclear waste from a foreign power originally there at the behest of a colonial power? Greenland may find out in the years ahead, according to research by Jeff and William Colgan about a Cold War-era U.S. military base long thought buried beneath an ice cap.