With the Obama Administration moving forward on emissions reductions, the deadline for drafting the Sustainable Development Agenda, and a highly anticipated global climate summit in Paris, 2015 promises to be a crucial year for climate policy. “In many ways, last year was the year of building momentum, and this is the year of getting the work done,” said Lisa Friedman, deputy editor of ClimateWire, at the Wilson Center on January 5. [Video Below]

From the mountains and foothills of the Himalayas to the Terai plains, climate change is rapidly changing life in Nepal. Many communities however, are not strangers to environmental stress; for decades, rapid population growth alongside agriculture and fuelwood collection have degraded land and diminished forests. [Video Below]

The damming of a river that feeds the world’s largest desert lake could lead not only to less drinking water for thousands of Kenyans, but international conflict between tribes for what little water remains.

“There is no magic bullet or solution to resolving climate change quickly,” said the Population Reference Bureau’s Jason Bremner at the Wilson Center on October 28. “Our next 100 years will be far different from the last 100 or the last 1000…and it has become clear that nations will have to pursue many strategies in order to reduce emissions, build resilience, and adapt.” [Video Below]

“We don’t know the reason for the death of fish in downstream villages,” Hamberton Nongtdu, a mine owner from the northeastern Indian state of Meghalaya, told me.

In his 2007 best-seller, The World Without Us, Alan Weisman explored what would happen to the planet if the human race suddenly vanished – the gradual deterioration of the built environment, the geologic fossilization of our everyday stuff, and the ecological processes that would rebound and thrive without continual and growing human pressure. [Video Below]

As climate change upends established patterns of life, resilience – the ability of social and ecological systems to mitigate, endure, and adapt to short-term shocks and long-term stressors – has become a buzzword in development and humanitarian circles. [Video Below]