The UN’s Water Conference, running March 22nd-24th, marks the international organization’s first global freshwater conference in nearly 50 years. The event’s main output will be an international Water Action Agenda, made up of voluntary water management plans from dozens of governments, businesses, NGOs and others. The UN has received more than 500 commitments so far, but WRI finds that most aren’t ambitious enough to create substantial change in the world. WRI experts assess how Water Action Agenda pledges stack up and detail what’s needed to create a water-secure future. Read more.  

Floods have battered the state of California for months, and residents are bracing for yet another blast. These kinds of devastating weather events are unfortunately a precursor of what’s to come: Data from WRI’s Aqueduct Floods platform shows that 8 times as many Californians will be impacted by coastal floods in 2030 compared to 2010. And California is not alone. Aqueduct data shows the number of people around the world affected by floods is expected to double between 2010 and 2030. Read more.

The theme of this year’s International Forests Day (March 21st) was “Forests and Health.” One under-recognized role forests play in human health is maintaining safe temperatures, especially in the tropics. Forests help produce rainfall and cool the air, serving as a natural air conditioning system. Deforestation threatens this process, and, when paired with the warming effects of climate change, can create dangerously high heat for people living in Brazil, Indonesia and other tropical nations. Read more.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the world’s most authoritative scientific body on climate change — recently released its Sixth Assessment Report, the most comprehensive, best available data on climate change to date. The findings? Earth is on track to breach dangerous temperature thresholds in the early 2030s, bringing increasingly severe water and food shortages, violent storms, floods and more. WRI experts offer a synthesis of the report’s key findings. Read more.