The world has entered a new energy era. Last year, for the first time in four decades, the global economy grew without an increase in CO2 emissions, according to the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21^st Century.

China’s announcement of a nationwide cap-and-trade program is a sign that the government is serious in its “war against pollution,” says China Environment Forum Director Jennifer Turner, and it may help move the climate change discussion in the United States too.

The focus of the global community on the outcomes of the Paris Conference of Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in December is unprecedented. The world awaits, anticipating the details of an international and legally-binding agreement to address climate change. [Video Below]

The announcement in Washington on September 24 that President Xi Jinping is committing China to a national carbon trading system is the latest step in an important partnership between the two biggest carbon emitters in the world.

United States President Barack Obama invested four years and his top diplomats in containing Iran’s nuclear capabilities. He did this because an armed Iran is an existential threat to its neighbors, its region, and the world. Obama’s efforts in the talks stand in marked contrast to those geared toward addressing an even bigger and longer-term existential threat – containing climate change. The conditions that allow humans to survive, evolve, and thrive on earth are being compromised; radical changes in the climate promise a very uncertain future.

As Pope Francis gets into high gear on his visit to the United States, it’s worth reviewing details and contexts in the extraordinary message to Catholics and the rest of the planet in “On Care for Our Common Home,” the encyclical he issued earlier this year.

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.

One of the last biodiversity hotspots in Europe was also backdrop to one of its last violent conflicts and now home to its newest nation states. The Prokletije/Bjeshket e Nemuna Mountains, often referred to as the Southern Alps, are a large expanse of wilderness and stunning alpine landscapes that form the border between Montenegro, Albania, and Kosovo. Three national parks share borders and form a patchwork of protected land that could be the basis for an international peace park – a shared resource that could promote cross-cultural exchange collaborative natural resource management, and eco-tourism.