The black, blasted landscape of Wuhai City sometimes looks more like the moon than Inner Mongolia. But this scene is becoming all too common across much of Northern China. China’s massive coal industry is not only polluting the air and water, but also fundamentally altering the surrounding landscape and communities.

Fire needs oxygen to burn. When a fire starts inside a building, the floors, ceilings, walls, doors, and windows can constrict the flow of air. Breaking in to fight the fire thus carries the risk of opening a new airway. If that happens, a smoldering fire can expand explosively, bursting into roaring flames as it sucks air in through the new passageway. This sudden inrush of air to fuel a burst of fire has a name: backdraft.

China’s economic boom appears to be contagious. Over the past few years, China’s northern neighbor has quietly caught the bug and become the world’s second-fastest growing economy, experiencing a GDP growth rate of approximately 17.3 percent in 2011. 

As President Obama readies a new road map for addressing climate change in the United States, experts warn that poorly designed and implemented initiatives, especially in already-fragile parts of the world, could unintentionally provoke conflicts, rather than diffuse them.

The original version of this article, by Keith Schneider, appeared on Circle of Blue. Choke Point: India is a research and reporting initiative produced in partnership between Circle of Blue and the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum and Asia Program.

Perhaps because India is so big, so bewildering and chaotic, and so determined to update its elusive rural identity with sleek urban flare, Indians and the national press are fascinated by how the nation’s wild animals are faring amid the dizzying change. In many cases, not well.

Despite the appearance of a new, “greener” economy, extractive industries – mining, oil, and natural gas – are now responsible for “moving more earth each year, just for mining and quarrying, than the global hydrological cycle,” writes the Transatlantic Academy’s Stacy VanDeveer in a recent paper, Still Digging: Extractive Industries, Resource Curses, and Transnational Governance in the Anthropocene. The costs of this activity are high and extend well beyond the wallet, he explains.