Climate change is a very real threat. It will have major implications for every country and region in the world, but South Asia is particularly vulnerable. To appropriately address the challenges there, the world will have to confront four misconceptions about climate change in South Asia. With world leaders convening in Paris to hash out a new agreement on climate change, now is the right time to do it.

The most important and anticipated climate change conference in years is finally underway. In some ways, as Bill McKibben and Andrew Revkin have pointed out, its success is relatively assured thanks to the number of major commitments countries have already made. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to see here. “The conference isn’t the game – it’s the scoreboard,” writes McKibben. To extend the metaphor even more, you might call it the league scoreboard, giving us a glimpse of many different storylines playing out.

As the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP) gets underway in Paris, #resilience appears with increasing frequency on my Twitter feed, and I frequently hear talk about “socio-ecological resilience,” “climate-resilient development,” and “resilience programming.”

Last week, at a meeting of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, the United States, Japan, and several other nations reached an agreement that will restrict financing for overseas coal projects. The deal will limit investment in the dirtiest, coal-fired power plants but will allow some continued investment in more efficient coal technology. Japan is one of the major sources of finance for the coal industry, so the agreement is an important moment in the effort to reduce global emissions.

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.

In a commanding speech at Old Dominion University this week, Secretary Kerry announced a dramatic step toward integrating climate and security into U.S. foreign policy. In Norfolk, Virginia, home to the world’s largest naval station, Kerry said the State Department is creating a new “task force of senior government officials to determine how best to integrate climate and security analysis into overall foreign policy planning and priorities.”

The renewable energy sector has reached a critical inflection point where costs are competitive with fossil fuels and investment is ramping up in a big way, said more than a dozen experts at a day-long conference co-hosted by ECSP and the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Office of Global Climate Change on October 27.