For years, the Chepang people have lived off the land in Nepal’s forested central foothills. Communities cleared trees to start small subsistence farms, harvested the surrounding area for firewood, and eventually moved on after the wood, soil, and water were depleted.

It was a scorching hot April afternoon in Keur Moussa, a small farming community about 60 kilometers outside Dakar, Senegal. The landscape was mostly barren and very dry, and a fine red dust settled into our clothes as we walked with community leaders to learn about their efforts to cope with a changing environment. In this part of the world, adapting to climate change is figuring out how to manage water: how to survive for long periods without it, and what to do when too much comes at unexpected times.

“The idea that there’s an information deficit – that if you fill it, it’ll change the world – is fantasy,” says Andrew Revkin in an interview at the Wilson Center.

As the war in Syria shows no signs of letting up, a recent article in Middle Eastern Studies put forward the hypothesis that the brutal conflict was triggered by government mismanagement of the country’s recent drought, which lasted from 2006 to 2010. It’s a story we’ve heard before.

While climate change has enjoyed a recent spike in news coverage, journalists face a constant challenge to bring sustained attention to other environmental stories, including resource scarcity, the changing oceans, and demographic change. [Video Below]

“If there was a perfect slum, Kibera would be it.” The notoriously overcrowded and underserved settlement in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi captivates the public imagination, engendering visions of urban violence, poverty, and hopelessness, said Caroline Wanjiku Kihato of the University of the Witwatersrand at the Wilson Center on February 18. The area was ravaged by ethnic violence that erupted across the country following Kenya’s disputed 2007 elections, pitting neighbor against neighbor in tribal clashes that killed more than 1,000 people, displaced many thousands more, and provoked an alarming surge in sexual violence.

The pork industry in China accounts for 65 percent of domestic meat consumption, but also produces 1.29 billion metric tons of waste every year. China’s growing appetite for meat has put tremendous pressure on the livestock sector, which now produces three times more waste than industrial sources, and created a series of environmental and food safety issues.

Earlier this week, the Department of Defense released its first Quadrennial Defense Review since fiscal cliffs, shutdowns, and spending cuts hit the federal government. Not surprisingly, “austerity” shows up in almost every chapter of the report. What shows up even more? Climate change. For the second QDR in a row, the Pentagon has called out climate change as a “significant challenge for the United States and the world at large.”