Exactly 25 years ago the international community met in Cairo for the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development. In the aftermath of the Cold War, ethnic conflict seemed to be exploding globally and research on the role of population growth and resource scarcity found an eager audience among policy makers struggling to understand this new international disorder. ECSP’s founding in that same year positioned the program as a leader in bringing together the scholarly and policy communities around non-traditional security issues over the last 25 years. The last two-and-a-half decades have brought tremendous change in population trends, environmental change, and the security landscape. Over the next 25 years three trends will shape the agenda of those working on the nexus of population-environment-security issues.

1. For the first time in history, countries around the globe will face development and population aging challenges simultaneously. Twenty-five years ago, few in the political demography and policy communities were talking about population aging and its impact on social, economic, and political dynamics. Over the last three decades Japan, Germany, and Italy carved the path as the world’s first countries to reach median ages over 35, 40, then 45 years, providing a crystal ball for the rest of the world that shows what decades of low fertility and low mortality mean for the national aggregate. The rest of Europe and most of Asia followed suit and now the Western Hemisphere is poised to do the same. What happens when countries emerge from the “sweet spot” of demographic transition to an intensely aging population?
2. The challenges posed by climate change will bring sustained attention to the importance of integrated approaches to development. Recognition of the connections between population and environment has waxed and waned in popularity over the last 3 decades. In 1997, just three years after ECSP’s founding, UN members agreed on the Kyoto Protocol, committing to address climate change. While we can hardly label global climate governance successful, efforts in the development community to address population and environment connections have grown. In particular, we’ve seen a focus on PHE programs—Population, Health, and Environment—and increasing recognition among the policy community that attention to all three areas simultaneously is needed to make real progress in development.
3. While the global security landscape is constantly shifting, and predicting new challenges on the horizon is increasingly difficult, the same on-the-ground, local challenges to development and security we’ve seen for the last three decades will persist. Twenty-five years ago, with the “coming anarchy” of the 1990s and concerns about scarcity and overpopulation, the defense and intelligence communities were eager for analysis on population and environment issues; in the early 2000s, the pivot to a focus on terrorism led to a declining interest in those areas. As the national security community grapples with identifying and responding to the underlying drivers of radicalization and terrorism, however, interest in population and environment issues and their connection to stability is resurging.

These three trends will interact in increasingly dynamic ways. In many wealthy, industrialized countries around the world, the next 25 years will be marked by aging populations with high carbon footprints that further exacerbate climate change. Yet, the impacts of climate change will be most acutely felt by the world’s most vulnerable, many of whom are in the least developed countries with the highest rates of population growth. Understanding population, environment, and security dynamics as they play out over the next 25 years will be vital to informing effective policies and programs on the ground.