How one Kenyan farmer went from ‘nothing’ to the envy of the neighborhood — This story originally appeared on National Geographic Voices blog. The highway from Nairobi to Purity Gacaga’s dairy farm runs through the croplands of central Kenya: hundreds of square miles of maize and vegetables, interrupted halfway along by the country’s largest rice plantation sprawling toward the horizon like a glassy green…

My surreal experience of Donald Trump’s election, far away from America When Donald J. Trump was elected President of the United States, I was sitting in a tin-roofed, dirt-floored cafe on the shore of Lake Victoria, in a bustling Kenyan fishing village called Usenge, waiting for a ferry and watching the sun rise. It should have been a serene morning. …

Some of the event’s sponsors might be part of the problem, not the solution. — You might not expect fossil fuel companies to pay for a conference designed to shrink their industry. But in Paris, that’s precisely what’s happening. This week and next, roughly 40,000 diplomats, activists, policy experts, and journalists are gathering in the French capital for a round of high-stakes negotiations aimed at…

President Obama and dozens of other world leaders reportedly plan to attend the Paris negotiations. — On Saturday, just a day after terrorist attacks in Paris left at least 129 people dead and hundreds more injured, the French government vowed to forge ahead with a long-scheduled international summit on climate change. The summit, which is scheduled to start in just two weeks, will take place at…

It’s an area half the size of Rhode Island. — The desert in Southern California could be in for a climate-friendly makeover, after the Obama administration released its plans to develop more renewable energy projects on federally owned land. On Tuesday the Interior Department released the final version of a plan that would open up about half a million non-contiguous…

California’s epic wildfire season has our fingerprints all over it. — Climate scientists are pretty good at figuring out the causes of long-term trends. We know that dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will make global temperatures rise over time. But pinning down the cause of any single weather event — a specific heat wave, hurricane, or drought — is much…