Canada is well known as a world leader in measures of human wellbeing. Since the launch of the UN Human Development Index in 1990, Canada has ranked among the top 10 countries every single year except one. But though Canadians can take a just pride in their country’s achievement on the global stage, it nevertheless masks grave concerns at home.

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.

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.

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 policy-makers are staking growing claims. [Video Below]

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?

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.