Arrayed along India’s southwest coast is a 1,600-kilometer-long mountain chain with forests older than the Himalayas: the Western Ghats. The mountains are one of the top biodiversity hotspots in the world, and UNESCO recently recognized the region as a World Heritage site. They’re also one of the tensest of India’s emerging battlegrounds between development and conservation and a potential recruiting ground for its Maoist insurgency, called the country’s “greatest threat to internal security.”

In may not be surprising that China, home to so many other superlatives, also faces desertification on a grand scale. According to China’s State Forestry Administration, over 27 percent of the country now suffers from desertification – more than 1,000,000 square miles, or about one-third of the continental United States – impacting the lives of more than 400 million people.

The original version of this article, by Eugenie Maiga, appeared on the Wilson Center’s Africa Up Close blog.

With the 2011 and 2012 food crises in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel, calls for urgent action and sustainable solutions to food insecurity in Africa have intensified. While many factors, like rising commodity prices, have been contributing factors, land degradation stands out as a main catalyst. In the search for a solution, indigenous farming techniques may offer some quick wins.

Today, the Sahara Desert is a vast, nearly lifeless expanse of sand and rock. But ancient cave paintings tell of a time when it was fertile grassland and bands of human hunters chased aurochs and antelope.

Wildlife areas and parks are designed to preserve plant and animal life in biological hotspots, but what about the people who live nearby these hotspots? In many parts of East Africa, communities press right up against park boundaries and people have few alternatives but to draw on the natural resources of protected areas. Conservation efforts depend on these communities’ cooperation and the sustainability – both environmentally and economically – of their livelihoods. [Video Below]

Water is the foundation of human society and will become even more critical as population growth, development, and climate change put pressure on already-shrinking water resources in the years ahead. But will this scarcity fuel conflict between countries with shared waters, as some have predicted, or will it create more impetus for cooperation?