There are too many animals for the available water supply in the Gobi desert region. The situation worsens each year.

Main photo: Bolortuya Bekh-Ochir, right, and Jargalsuren Tungalagzaya fill a trough with water for a herd of goats in Mongolia's Gobi desert region (URANCHIMEG TSOGKHUU, GPJ MONGOLIA)

Copper remains Zambia’s principal export and tax earner. But getting the product out is subject to challenges of both hardware and software.

 The towns on the road to Mongu are memorable for their roadside stalls and shiny tomatoes, throngs of people in brightly coloured chitenge, and the quaintly named shops. (Photo: Greg Mills)

Cash-strapped and cut off from international aid, the Taliban-led government is tapping into Afghanistan's natural resources to boost revenue.

Since the Taliban toppled the Western-backed government in Kabul and seized power in August 2021, the export of and custom duties from coal have become a key source of revenue for the militant group.

Main photo: The Chinese fence inside Myanmar’s territory in October 2021. / NamKhamnews

China has cut off electricity to a border village in northern Shan State for nearly nine months due to boundary disputes, according to residents. 

Known as the rice basket of the country, the delta now sees houses tumbling into rivers and livelihoods lost

When a riverbank subsided and gave way, Tran Van Bi’s house collapsed into a river in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta four years ago. Everything his family had accumulated over 32 years was gone in an instant.

Tensions are spiking once again in the chronically turbulent eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The M23 rebel movement — widely thought to be long dead — has dramatically resurrected. And DRC president Félix Tshisekedi has accused Rwandan president Paul Kagame of again backing it with military support.

• Much of the landscape of Indonesia’s East Kalimantan province has been transformed, its formerly vast forests razed for logging, monocrop agriculture and open-cast coal mining.
• A recently published study analyzes how waves of extractive industries have affected the inhabitants of one village in the province
• The cumulative impacts of these industries were found to be severe, but also to vary depending on multiple factors including ethnicity, gender, wealth and age.