When wildfires become unstoppable, consuming forests, farmlands, communities, and anything else in their path, how will those affected cope? When typhoons slam coastal populations, dumping over a foot of rain in a single event, who will be there to help mop up? When seas rise up, drowning centuries-old communities, where will the displaced go?

Rivers have shaped the Western Balkan Peninsula’s characteristic landscape and played an important role in its history. Following the violence of the Yugoslav secession wars in the 1990s and the creation of six new nations, the number of transboundary river basins doubled from 6 to 13. In Kosovo, where independence remains a question, the water sector is a microcosm of tensions between ethnic Serbs and Albanians. The challenge of water resource management exists not only over the province’s contested national boundaries with Serbia, but between divided ethnic groups within the territory.

“The time for talk is done; it is now the time for action,” says Inger Andersen, director general of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), in an interview before the 2016 World Conservation Congress.

Women make up between 40 to 50 percent of the artisanal mining workforce in Africa compared to a world average of 30 percent, says Southern Voices Network Scholar Maame Esi Eshun in an interview with Wilson Center NOW. But despite the number of women in the sector, they are often relegated to the periphery when it comes to decision-making and leadership, undermining peacebuilding efforts in these areas.

In June 2010, The New York Times published a front page story trumpeting a Pentagon announcement of roughly $1 trillion worth of mineral resources in Afghanistan. Officials said the discovery was “far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself.” Then-President Hamid Karzai soon inflated the figure to $3 trillion and then again to $30 trillion, enough to transform the country into the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.”

Conflict is typically viewed as a failure of social and political systems and almost never as a method of transforming dysfunctional or fractured societies into cohesive units. However, in an analysis of the discourse around climate change and conflict in Local Environment, Melissa Nursey-Bray concludes that conflict is a sometimes-necessary step in a complicated process to create stable societies. Nursey-Bray separates the climate-conflict discourse into two baskets: climate change as a security risk and climate change as one of many factors that contribute to insecurity.

In the mountains of northern Afghanistan, between Pakistan and China, a region that has historically rejected the Taliban has become the group’s second-largest source of revenue. The twisting tale of Kuran wa Munjan reveals the challenges of extracting precious minerals in unstable and fragile states.

I remember the first time I made the four-day trek into the heart of Bolivia’s Carrasco National Park (CNP) 12 years ago like it was yesterday. I knew it would be a challenge to help communities agree on the boundaries of the protected area, given the high level of tension between indigenous communities, illegal migrant farmers, and park authorities over land rights, but I was unprepared for just how intense our first meeting would be.