Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos and the richest woman in Africa, owes her wealth to the oil industry. Delfina Fernandes, a woman living in abject poverty in the village of Kibanga, uses gasoline as an anesthetic to dull the sheering pain of her rotting teeth.

With a new peace process underway between the Colombian government and leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in Cuba, the spotlight is back on this long-troubled South American country. But decades of civil conflict have overshadowed an incredible fact: Colombia is among the four most biologically diverse countries on Earth.

Given that there have been three major peace processes in Sudan’s troubled western province of Darfur, the current escalation of violence indicates that perhaps something about existing approaches is failing to hit the mark. Identifying what is missing is vital – not just for Darfur, but for other areas with similar challenges of state fragility, poverty, and competition over natural resources.

Opportunities for research, enterprise, and exploration in the Arctic are expanding as climate change renders the northernmost reaches of the globe more accessible – and visible – than ever before. Often overlooked, however, are the people who actually live there. Four million people make their home in the resource-rich Arctic, where developers and policymakers are staking growing claims. [Video Below]

Last week, the United Nations concluded one of the last negotiations on the road to adopting the Sustainable Development Goals in September. We’ve entered the home stretch of a process that has taken more than two years, bringing governments, civil society organizations, and communities together to define the development goals and targets that UN member states will be expected to aim for over the next 15 years.

REDD+, a global framework designed to reward governments for preserving forests, has pledged nearly $10 billion to developing countries. But minorities, indigenous people, the poor, and other marginalized groups that live in forest areas often end up paying more than their fair share of the costs of environmental cleanup and conservation while getting less in return. What can be done to change this?

If you’re a government pondering the development of newly discovered natural resources, how do you avoid the so-called “resource curse” – the tendency of high value extractive resources, like oil, gas, or minerals, to, instead of prosperity, bring corruption, entrenched poverty, and even violence?