Blue Ventures has become a leader in the population, health, and environment (PHE) community through its work with the remote, semi-nomadic Vezo people living along Madagascar’s southwestern coast. In a new short documentary, The Freedom to Choose: Empowering Communities to Live With the Sea, Blue Ventures describes how their approach has helped the Vezo respond to the combined challenges of resource scarcity, poor reproductive health, and unsustainable livelihoods.

In southwestern China, three parallel rivers – the Nu, Lancang, and Jinsha (also known as the Upper Mekong, Salween, and Yangtze, respectively) – form a series of corridors that connect the tropical rainforests of Southeast Asia to the Tibetan Plateau. These areas are some of the most biodiverse in the world, and scientists argue they have value as “climate refugia” – places worth preserving in order to allow species to retreat to cooler, more suitable climates as temperatures rise. A cascade of dams, however, has been planned for the region, threatening to submerge habitats, reduce the flow of tributary rivers, and make the area less suitable for many plant and animal species.

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is an attempt to get an international group of scientists together to assess what we know about climate change,” says Geoff Dabelko in an interview with the Wilson Center’s Context program. “That is not a quick process.”

The idea that China, the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions, could generate a significant portion of its energy from renewable sources might seem like a distant dream, but according to a new report, it’s not so far off. [Video Below]

Last year a Kiribati man, Ioane Teitiota, claimed asylum in New Zealand, stating that his home island, which is on average just two meters above sea level, was becoming uninhabitable thanks to rising seas. So-called “king tides” routinely wash over entire portions of the archipelago.

For years, the Chepang people have lived off the land in Nepal’s forested central foothills. Communities cleared trees to start small subsistence farms, harvested the surrounding area for firewood, and eventually moved on after the wood, soil, and water were depleted.

It was a scorching hot April afternoon in Keur Moussa, a small farming community about 60 kilometers outside Dakar, Senegal. The landscape was mostly barren and very dry, and a fine red dust settled into our clothes as we walked with community leaders to learn about their efforts to cope with a changing environment. In this part of the world, adapting to climate change is figuring out how to manage water: how to survive for long periods without it, and what to do when too much comes at unexpected times.

“The idea that there’s an information deficit – that if you fill it, it’ll change the world – is fantasy,” says Andrew Revkin in an interview at the Wilson Center.