Government policies are needed when people's behaviors fail to deliver the public good. Those policies will be most effective if they can stimulate l

This article represents a systematic effort to answer the question, What are archaeology’s most important scientific challenges? Starting with a crowd-sourced query directed broadly to the professional community of archaeologists, the authors augmented, prioritized, and refined the responses during a two-day workshop focused specifically on this question. The resulting 25 “grand challenges” focus on dynamic cultural processes and the operation of coupled human and natural systems. We organize these challenges into five topics: (1) emergence, communities, and complexity; (2) resilience, persistence, transformation, and collapse; (3) movement, mobility, and migration; (4) cognition, behavior, and identity; and (5) human-environment interactions. A discussion and a brief list of references accompany each question. An important goal in identifying these challenges is to inform decisions on infrastructure investments for archaeology. Our premise is that the highest priority investments should enable us to address the most important questions. Addressing many of these challenges will require both sophisticated modeling and large-scale synthetic research that are only now becoming possible. Although new archaeological fieldwork will be essential, the greatest pay off will derive from investments that provide sophisticated research access to the explosion in systematically collected archaeological data that has occurred over the last several decades.

Southeast Asia is one of the most dynamic regions in the world in terms of economic growth and urbanization. At the same time, the region is also prone to multiple hydro-meteorological disasters, which are projected to be intensified by climate change. This paper analyzes the combined effect of economic development and climate change on the future water security of middle-income Southeast Asian countries using the double exposure framework, focusing on the effects in urban areas. A review of the existing literature reveals unequal water security outcomes across the region as a result of combined climate, economic, and urbanization pressures. The water supply and sanitation infrastructure of upper-middle-income Southeast Asian countries are vulnerable to damage from intensified disasters, potentially decreasing both immediate and longer-term water quality. In lower-middle-income countries, the water quality will be the more important water security challenge in the short-term as opposed to water quantity, mainly due to the fast growth of industries. Lower-middle-income countries, though less vulnerable to disasters, will still have lower future water security compared to upper-middle-income countries, as they have less capacity to address water quality and quantity challenges brought about by both industrial growth and urbanization. Across the region, future water quantity and quality challenges may result in slower economic and urban growth if not planned adequately.