“Population is critical to thinking about sustainability and human wellbeing, and how we live and subsist on the planet,” says ECSP’s Roger-Mark De Souza on this World Population Day.

World Population Day was started in the 1980s by the United Nations Development Program after global population passed 5 billion. Today, there are more than 7 billion on Earth, and this year’s theme is investing in young people.

“Globally, we have the largest cohort of adolescents that we have ever had,” says De Souza, director of population, environmental change, and resilience at the Wilson Center in an interview with CONTEXT.

Since the Arab Spring, the “youth bulge” concept has received a lot of attention – typically as a source of potential instability. This year’s World Population Day shows the other side of the coin: when empowered with education, jobs, and good health, young people can pave the way to a better future.

“How do we capitalize on this youthful population?” De Souza asks. “How do we make sure that they have useful and meaningful employment to make a difference in their lives today? How do we empower them? And how do we think about the best ways of doing that?” These are questions policymakers should be considering.

Take the environment: rapid population growth or migration can create local natural resource scarcity and vulnerability, pushing some people to move elsewhere, where the cycle repeats itself. Climate change makes the interaction all the more unpredictable.

Some of the best success stories of communities and policymakers responding to these challenges are holistic, integrated development solutions. In Ethiopia, for instance, a “very progressive” rights-based population policy is combining with robust public health infrastructure to expand access to a range of sexual and reproductive health services. These services give young people and families the opportunity to determine their number and spacing of births, easing population and environmental pressures.

Importantly, in many cases Ethiopia’s sexual and reproductive health outreach isn’t being done in isolation. Integrated population, health, and environment (PHE) programs are combining access to health services with environmental conservation and poverty reduction to bring short- and long-term benefits to rural communities. “Ethiopia is emerging as very much a success story, where we see issues around population, health, and environment being integrated in a way that’s making a difference in people’s lives today,” says De Souza.

“We know what the solutions are,” he says. The problems holding back young people are complex, but integrated, rights-based solutions provide ways to empower young people to control their own lives.