The original version of this article, by Kagondu Njagi, appeared on Thomson Reuters’ AlertNet.

By the time the violence had died down, more than 80 people lay dead and hundreds were left homeless.

Yet there was scarcely enough water – the resource the Maasai and Kikuyu tribes were fighting over – to wash away the blood that had stained this part of Kenya’s Rift Valley.

The original version of this article, by Nadya Ivanova, appeared on Circle of Blue.

The horizon gleams with a golden hue from the wheat fields that spread in all directions here in Shandong, a prime food-growing province on the lower reaches of the Yellow River. As hundreds of farmers spread the wheat like massive carpets to dry on country roads, combine machines are busy harvesting the grain. The same afternoon that the wheat harvest is finished, farmers will already be planting corn and other crops. This is how China feeds 1.4 billion citizens and millions of livestock.

The original version of this article, by Jonathan Pincus, appeared on Foreign Policy.

The Indonesian economy, which for so long had been an also-ran in the Asian growth derby, is getting good press these days. There’s no mystery why. While much of the world is struggling in the aftermath of the global financial meltdown, Indonesia continues to post annual economic growth rates in excess of six percent. What’s more, public debt is now less than 25 percent of GDP – down from 96 percent in 1999. And it is still falling relative to GDP: The budget deficit is only about two percent of GDP, among the lowest in the region.

The original version of this article, by Rachel Yavinsky, appeared on the Population Reference Bureau’s Behind the Numbers blog.

After 45 minutes on Lake Victoria in a wooden fishing boat, my PRB colleague and I arrived on Busi Island, one of the Ugandan sites of the HOPE-LVB (Health of People and the Environment – Lake Victoria Basin) project. PRB, who partners on this project, came to Busi Island to see HOPE-LVB in action.

The Wilson Center Policy Briefs are a series of short analyses of critical global issues facing the next administration that will run until inauguration day.

Seven billion people now live on Earth, only a dozen years after the global population hit six billion. But this milestone is not about sheer numbers. Demographic trends will significantly affect the planet’s resources and people’s security.

High mountain regions face grave environmental challenges with climate change impacts already as severe as any place on earth. Temperature increases are expected to be greater at higher altitudes than at sea level, and glaciers and snowfields are retreating in many areas, increasing the risk of catastrophic glacial lake outburst floods, affecting fresh water supplies for hundreds of millions of people, and exacerbating territorial and natural resource disputes.

If Hurricane Sandy was a wake-up call for many in the United States to the kind of extreme weather that climate change is expected to bring, Typhoon Bopha, which struck the Philippines a month later, is a reminder of what makes developing regions even more vulnerable to these changes.

Rich, untapped deposits of gold, iron, copper, lithium, and rare earth minerals have been known in Afghanistan for decades, but recently, extensive reports from the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Geological Survey have shed new light on their potential value.