As Saddam Hussein drained Iraq’s famed marshes to punish the rebellious tribesmen who lived in them, Amjad Mohamed packed his few possessions, grabbed his fishing rod, and fled south to Basra with his extended family.

“Tackling climate change could be the greatest global health opportunity of the 21^st century,” asserts the newest report by the Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change.

The landscape of the northeastern Indian state of Meghalaya is rapidly changing. What was once a predominately agricultural economy has shifted to coal mining with significant consequences for people and the environment. “Once you extract coal from the land, it’s really hard to go back to an agricultural economy,” says ECSP’s Sean Peoples in an interview with Wilson Center NOW, about the Global Choke Point film, Broken Landscape.

On a warm January afternoon, Tesema Merga, a village elder in Endibir, Ethiopia, surveyed the latest improvements to the long dirt road just outside his house. Eventually this road will be paved, which will bring significant changes to the community.

I distinctly remember the night I saw An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. The film essentially did what no high school teacher could: gave me a purpose to structure my studies, setting me on course to earn a degree in environmental studies, an advanced degree in natural resource conservation, and eventually working here, at the Wilson Center.