The landscape of the northeastern Indian state of Meghalaya is rapidly changing. What was once a predominately agricultural economy has shifted to coal mining with significant consequences for people and the environment. “Once you extract coal from the land, it’s really hard to go back to an agricultural economy,” says ECSP’s Sean Peoples in an interview with Wilson Center NOW, about the Global Choke Point film, Broken Landscape.

On a warm January afternoon, Tesema Merga, a village elder in Endibir, Ethiopia, surveyed the latest improvements to the long dirt road just outside his house. Eventually this road will be paved, which will bring significant changes to the community.

I distinctly remember the night I saw An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. The film essentially did what no high school teacher could: gave me a purpose to structure my studies, setting me on course to earn a degree in environmental studies, an advanced degree in natural resource conservation, and eventually working here, at the Wilson Center.

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]

“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.