HONG KONG, China — Nearly a decade after Chinese environmentalists achieved one of their greatest successes by stalling plans to build 13 dams on the Nujiang, one of China’s two remaining free-flowing rivers, the “angry river” is under threat again.

Earlier this year, the government announced it would help power the country’s densely populated, industry-heavy eastern seaboard by re-instating a project to build five new mega-dams along the Nujiang and several other waterways in China’s biologically rich southwest.

Flowing nearly 1,800 miles from the Tibetan plateau through southwestern Yunnan Province into Thailand and Myanmar — where it’s known as the Salween — the Nujiang supports an estimated 25 percent of China’s plant and animal species, many of which are found nowhere else in the world.

Environmentalists struggle to stop Chinese dam project

Photo by AFP/Getty Images

TAMURA, FUKUSHIMA, Japan — One bamboo branch and spade of soil at a time, workers are slowly purging Fukushima of its nuclear legacy.

On a chilly, overcast afternoon in Tamura, which lies along the 20-kilometer (12 mile) evacuation zone around the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, crews continue the painstaking task of decontaminating neighborhoods irradiated by the March 2011 triple meltdown.

Some tear down bamboo groves near homes belonging to evacuated families. Others drill into layers of winter-hardened earth, and shovel it into black hazardous waste sacks.

When radiation levels fall to their target level, they will add a new layer of clean topsoil sourced from elsewhere.

On Location Video: The dirty work of cleaning up Fukushima

Photo by AFP/Getty Images

The United States is suffering its worst drought in 50 years. Yes, that’s bad news for Americans. But what happens in the parched fields and prairies of the Midwest can affect people, prices and political stability worldwide.

In this reporting series GlobalPost correspondents and editors investigate what America’s drought means for the rest of our hungry and increasingly worried planet.

Latin America’s biggest economy, Brazil, is betting on vast offshore oil treasures to leapfrog ahead of the world’s top crude producers. But sometimes the obstacles seem too huge for the country to reach its ambitious targets. Meanwhile, the fuel-guzzling United States hopes that a friendly country like Brazil will help wean it off an unhealthy dependency on other, drama-prone oil suppliers. Will Brazil fit the bill?

Read more on GlobalPost.

Crude Awakening. 

Latin America’s biggest economy, Brazil, is betting on vast offshore oil treasures to leapfrog ahead of the world’s top crude producers. But sometimes the obstacles seem too huge for the country to reach its ambitious targets. Meanwhile, the fuel-guzzling United States hopes that a friendly country like Brazil will help wean it off an unhealthy dependency on other, drama-prone oil suppliers. Will Brazil fit the bill?

Click here for the interactive infographics. 

LIMA, Peru — Chilean Patagonia is home to spectacular fjords, raging rivers, vast pine forests and imposing granite peaks, not to mention mountain lions, condors and endangered huemul deer.

Renowned as one of the last great wildernesses, it is now also the scene of a bitter fight over plans to build five hydroelectric dams that would satisfy a quarter of Chile’s rapidly growing hunger for electricity.

The $3.2 billion HidroAysen project would build three power stations on the Pascua River and another two on the Baker River, in the southern region of Aysen. That would generate a massive 2,750 megawatts of power for the national grid.