Camels pulling wooden carts loaded with coconuts plod down the main road amid speeding motorcycles, buses, rickshaws, and cars. Farmers sit atop slow-moving oxcarts loaded with grasses and other cattle feed. In this region of central Gujarat, India, it appears that rural life has not changed for decades.

Global climate trends indicate that our planet will continue warming into the next century, leading to more extreme climate conditions. The Latin America and Caribbean region is vulnerable to some of the most challenging aspects of climate change – sea-level rise, changes in precipitation, glacial melting, spreading of disease, and extreme weather events.

In May 2011, two weeks before I was scheduled to start research in the region, a Mongol herder named Mergen was hit by a mining truck while protecting his pastureland in Xilingol, Inner Mongolia. He was dragged 140 feet and killed. His death sparked a month of protests.

For all its flaws, the United Nations remains the only plausible forum for engaging broad global challenges like sustainable development. The most important environmental achievements of the past 40 years – the rise of environmental awareness, the birth of key ideas such as sustainability or the common heritage of humanity and the most important global treaties for environmental protection – all bear the UN stamp in one way or another. We could have added environmental human rights to that legacy last month, but we failed.

When war breaks out, what happens to the weather forecast? Violent conflict disrupts many essential services in developing countries and one of the most overlooked is meteorology, which has surprisingly big consequences for farmers, policymakers, and the aid workers who are there to help.

The board of the United Nations’ lead organization on trade and development, called UNCTAD, released an assessment of Gaza’s development challenges during their annual meeting in Geneva this month and the news is not good. In 2012, the UN warned that a “herculean” development effort would be to keep pace with Gaza’s rapid population growth. Since then, more fighting with Israel has made things worse, particularly with regard to water and food security. Ninety-five percent of the water from Gaza’s coastal aquifer is unsafe for drinking without treatment, the report says. Contamination and over-extraction may even render it unusable by next year and damage may be irreversible if not addressed in the next five years.

The Sundarbans – a collection of densely populated islands in India’s sprawling Ganges Delta – are so remote that the only way to get there is by boat. But human traffickers still manage to get in, and that’s left many families with missing daughters.

According to recent polling, climate change is seen as the single most threatening international challenge around the world, and there’s evidence that all that worry is taking a psychological toll. Adding to droughts, floods, extreme weather, and die-offs, psychologists are observing higher levels of anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder in certain areas and professions. Even people who do not actively stress about global warming or view it as a major threat may still suffer psychological trauma from its effects.