It appears increasingly certain that the Colombian government will sign a peace agreement with the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2016. The oil and gas industry is widely expected to be among the sectors to most benefit from the end of 50 years of armed conflict. But a new report commissioned by the Latin American Program has identified several challenges to that optimistic view.

The climate agreement reached in Paris last December, seen by many as a critical step toward lowering greenhouse gas emissions, was big news – perhaps too big. Pointing to the thousands of articles about COP-21, National Geographic Senior Editor Marla Cone asked at a recent Wilson Center panel, “Is this a wise use of resources, when newsrooms are so stretched thin, to have everybody pretty much chasing the same stories?”

The government of El Salvador took a truly extraordinary step in an attempt to control the rapidly spreading Zika virus last week by asking its citizens to avoid getting pregnant from now until 2018. Yes, you read that right.

Venezuela seems suspended at a critical juncture. Following national elections in December, the opposition Democratic Unity Roundtable was set to occupy two thirds of the 167-seat National Assembly, an upset that would reduce the late Hugo Chávez’s United Socialist Party to a distant second place for the first time and given opposition legislators the power to enact sweeping political changes.

The new climate deal coming out of Paris commits governments to hold the rise in average global temperatures to “well below” two degrees Celsius compared to preindustrial levels. An important dimension of this agreement calls for subsequent work on limiting the increase to 1.5 degrees. This is an important win for islands and other low-lying countries, and for humanity.

When Colombia is in the news, it’s not necessarily for the reasons we Colombians would like. We have lived through 50 years of violent conflict. Peace is a very abstract idea to most of us. Despite this we are still some of the happiest people on Earth.

Global climate trends indicate that our planet will continue warming into the next century, leading to more extreme climate conditions. The Latin America and Caribbean region is vulnerable to some of the most challenging aspects of climate change – sea-level rise, changes in precipitation, glacial melting, spreading of disease, and extreme weather events.

Scenario planning has a long history. The RAND Corporation employed it heavily in planning for potential U.S. responses to nuclear war and 16^th century Spanish Jesuit theologians pointed to the idea as proof of free will. But in many respects this powerful set of methodological tools for managing complexity and uncertainty remains underused, especially beyond the defense, intelligence, and business communities.