Last September, facing a growing public outcry to ease smog, China’s State Council called for the accelerated development of a new energy industry that turns coal into methane gas. Piped to Beijing and other cities, this gas could help cut down on smog by replacing dirtier fuels now used to cook meals, heat homes, and produce electricity. But embracing it involves a major environmental trade-off in overall carbon emissions.

As the earth’s surface grows hotter and precipitation becomes more variable due to the impacts of climate change, the world is in need of solutions to more effectively store water supplies. One potential solution is deceptively simple: store water in aquifers below the ground.

You might wonder what the Cold War has to do with climate change, but as I listened last month to historian James Graham Wilson talk about the “triumph of improvisation” that ended the nearly 50-year stare-down between the United States and the U.S.S.R., I was struck by the parallels. The idea of individual leaders escaping the momentum of conventional approaches and adapting on the fly to solve a major global issue deeply resonated with me. It’s exactly what international climate change negotiations desperately need.

Evaluation is the lifeblood of any development effort – it’s how implementers know if they’re making a difference, determine what to do more or less of, and enables funders to evaluate cost-effectiveness. But it’s also an inexact science, no more so than when it comes to complex interventions that cut across sectors. [Video Below]

Half the world’s pigs – 476 million – reside in China. Increasingly prosperous consumers are eating fewer grains and demanding a more protein-rich diet, ballooning the pork industry to 15 times its 1960s-era size. In the last 30 years, Chinese demand for meat has quadrupled and China is now the largest consumer of seafood in the world.

The emerging subfield of “security demographics” is interested in how demographic trends, such as youth bulges, high or low fertility rates, and sex ratios affect the security and stability of nation-states and regions. In our research, Andrea Den Boer and I have attempted to show that abnormally high sex ratios – situations where there are significantly more men than women – have been a security concern in the past and may affect security and stability in the future.

Political and economic changes in Burma have been as rapid as they are surprising. In just three years, the country has gone from an isolated military dictatorship to a largely open country that is at least semi-democratic and has formally adopted a market economy. Both the European Union and the United States have eased economic sanctions, and dozens of foreign firms have moved in. Foreign direct investment increased by 160 percent in 2013 alone.