As we reach the two-year mark of the Sustainable Development Goals, a new policy support system provides authoritative evidence to help governments set clear paths to achieving water-related targets.

Efforts to end open defecation through rapid installation of low-cost pit latrines must be cautious of the potential impacts on groundwater and human health.

Despite the immense scale of freshwater systems at the centre of SDG 6, ensuring availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all will require an approach that scales up from communities to better understand how water is used in daily life.

As the world faces growing water scarcity, food production will increasingly rely on the use of recycled wastewater, and technologies that make its use safer.

In a world where vital resources are increasingly scarce, the water we have already used can be properly managed to become an affordable and sustainable source of energy, nutrients, and other recoverable materials.

For India to meet its goal of eliminating open defecation, it will need cooperation between a diverse variety of systemic actors, generation of knowledge products, and community engagement to build safe toilets and use them well.

This week’s UN High-level Meeting on Antimicrobial Resistance spotlights a fundamental threat to human health, development, and security, but wastewater research must be recognised as a critical component of understanding and combating the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria.

As environmental change is increasingly recognised as a powerful driver of migration, new policy frameworks must also acknowledge how it involuntarily “traps” households by curbing their ability to move when desired.

As the Trump Administration promotes a proposal to cut legal immigration to the United States using a ‘merit’-based points system, a closer look at current research demonstrates overwhelmingly positive economic impacts of US immigrants and their families.

The mortality and morbidity burdens of non-communicable diseases constitute a major public health crisis that undermines and threatens to reverse decades of socioeconomic development in low- and middle-income countries.

UNU Policy Adviser Rebecca Brubaker offers five recommendations for reinforcing UN sanctions as the Security Council seeks to bolster its “formidable instrument for global peace and security”.

Due to US pressure, the UN General Assembly has voted to cut $600 million from the UN Peacekeeping budget. The impact on women and girls must be addressed, or the cuts could cause serious harm.

A new study finds that even in best-case scenarios, the fishing communities most hurt by climate change are those of small island nations such as Kiribati, the Solomon Islands and the Maldives.

Habitat III is an opportunity to pave the way for culturally and contextually sensitive solutions to the challenges of rapid urbanisation in small island developing states.

Building “resilience” is a common development goal, but the concept’s varied interpretation presents many challenges when moving from notion to political discourse and sound policy.

An emerging rural-urban disparity in carbon emissions demonstrates how equal access to resources should form the bedrock of future urbanisation and climate governance.

The Sendai Framework, while falling short of expectations on many fronts, took some important steps towards integrating lessons from the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Experiences from Fukushima show that providing channels for public participation and dialogue is a crucial first step towards ensuring a sustainable recovery for communities impacted by complex disasters.

Knowing how key resilience is following a disaster, small-scale fishers of Japan’s Tohoku region offer support to Chile’s artisanal fishers impacted by a recent tsunami.

The Ministry of the Environment of Japan and UNU collaborate to produce a video documentary about the decontamination efforts in areas affected by radiation from the Fukushima nuclear accident.

Documentary filmmaker Kaori Brand reflects on the experience of producing this 30-minute video on the recovery efforts of the fishing communities hit by the March 2011 tsunami.

The resilience demonstrated by communities in Japan’s Tohoku region may be one of the best modern-day lessons on what the rest of the world can do to prepare for disasters and the consequences of climate change.