The Sundarbans – a collection of densely populated islands in India’s sprawling Ganges Delta – are so remote that the only way to get there is by boat. But human traffickers still manage to get in, and that’s left many families with missing daughters.

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.

With a new peace process underway between the Colombian government and leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in Cuba, the spotlight is back on this long-troubled South American country. But decades of civil conflict have overshadowed an incredible fact: Colombia is among the four most biologically diverse countries on Earth.

Given that there have been three major peace processes in Sudan’s troubled western province of Darfur, the current escalation of violence indicates that perhaps something about existing approaches is failing to hit the mark. Identifying what is missing is vital – not just for Darfur, but for other areas with similar challenges of state fragility, poverty, and competition over natural resources.

Opportunities for research, enterprise, and exploration in the Arctic are expanding as climate change renders the northernmost reaches of the globe more accessible – and visible – than ever before. Often overlooked, however, are the people who actually live there. Four million people make their home in the resource-rich Arctic, where developers and policymakers are staking growing claims. [Video Below]

If you’re a government pondering the development of newly discovered natural resources, how do you avoid the so-called “resource curse” – the tendency of high value extractive resources, like oil, gas, or minerals, to, instead of prosperity, bring corruption, entrenched poverty, and even violence?

In my tiny, half-an-island country of Timor-Leste, cemeteries smell of jasmine and come to life on All Saints’ Day. Families have picnics and kids roam wild over the tombstones. Here, stepping on somebody else’s family tombstones is not seen as an offense but as the norm; after all, since there isn’t enough land to hold so many graves, not stepping on one is impossible unless you have mastered levitation.

In their first annual report, the ResilientAfrica Network (RAN), a partnership of 15 African universities, Tulane University, Stanford University, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, outlines efforts to explore and define multiple “pathways of vulnerability” in sub-Saharan Africa. The report acknowledges that these pathways can be very different from place to place, but by working with African communities more closely, they hope to find new ways to break cycles of chronic crisis. One of the interventions piloted by Stanford was “deliberative polling,” which is  based on the premise that communities are more likely to respond to development interventions if they understand the logic behind them and are involved in the process.