Five South American countries have launched a joint sustainable management programme for the Río de la Plata basin, to preserve one of the largest fresh water reserves in the world.

Nepal’s joint forest management system has taken such deep roots that the country’s prolonged political instability has had little effect on it.

On August 26, Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan resigned, taking responsibility for the disastrous meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which was caused by the March 2011 undersea earthquake and ensuing tsunami.

An outbreak of sports fever has gripped the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Northern Pakistan, as increasing numbers of civilians and government officials latch on to team sports as their only armour against creeping militancy in the border region.

Mohamed El-Abyad's employer has agreed to increase his salary by 20 percent, but the factory worker still cannot afford to send his children to school. After paying his apartment rent and utilities, El-Abyad will have the equivalent of 20 dollars left over each month to put food on his family's table. And while education is mandatory, he pulled both his sons out of school to help cover the shortfall.

Life in Bwaise — a slum on the outskirts of the capital of Uganda — has never been easy. But increasingly erratic rains over the last three years have brought constant floods to the former swampland. Residents who can afford to are moving out, leaving the poorest — often single mothers and grandmothers — behind.

Thousands of people are being left physically and psychologically scarred as countries around the world continue to breach international law in handing out brutal but 'ineffective' corporal punishment for drug offences, it has been claimed.

Chungda Sherpa, a former herder from eastern Nepal, has a warning tale ahead of the United Nations climate change conference in Durban.

They're looking at you 'uncensored'. Posters of women by women have recently multiplied on the holy city walls. 'Women on billboards are back in Jerusalem,' they proclaim defiantly.

Water is the lifeblood of this planet, whose inhabitants are watching its accelerated spiral into crisis mode even as they struggle to address the issues and lifestyles that are stretching the earth's resources thin.