Natural resource management is a trust issue. There’s no better illustration of this than a scenario exercise. A new CNA Corporation report, Bone Dry and Flooding, details a simulation they ran for transboundary water management in the Indian sub-continent. Players of the game – nationals of China, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh who had all previously worked in politics, policy, or development – were given a hypothetical five-year time span to manage shared water resources.

Rice is a thirsty crop. Yet for the past three years, Alberto Mejia has been trying to reduce the amount of water he uses for irrigation on his 1,100-acre farm near Ibague in the tropical, central range of the Colombian Andes.

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.

BANGWEULU WETLANDS, Zambia – Out here on the endless swamps, a harsh truth has been passed down from generation to generation: There is no fear but the fear of hunger.

“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]