“However rapid change has been over the past couple decades, the rate of change will accelerate in the future,” states the newest quadrennial report from the National Intelligence Council (NIC), Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds. Released late last year, the report identifies the “game-changers, megatrends, and black swans” that may determine the trajectory of world affairs over the next 15 years, including demographic dynamics and natural resource scarcity. [Video Below]

Many of the fastest growing countries in the world today are also the poorest. A recent bulletin from the National Transfer Accounts Project, “Lower Income Countries and the Demographic Dividend,” examines what it takes for lower-income countries to experience a demographic dividend and the economic growth associated with that period. Achieving the demographic dividend is dependent on a country achieving low fertility rates, which, when coming from a period of high growth, temporarily increases the ratio of the working-age population to dependents, like children and the elderly. For lower-income countries to do this, the report recommends that policymakers invest in healthcare and education programs and focus on boosting the labor force participation rate. Looking forward, the report advises that it is not too early for lower-income countries to begin developing social security and pension programs to support the latter stages of the demographic transition too.

Dialogue at the Wilson Center tackled demography and the environment last week, interviewing Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former Wilson Center public policy scholar Caryle Murphy about her new book, A Kingdom’s Future: Saudi Arabia Through the Eyes of Its Twentysomethings, followed by John Sullivan, director of the Environment and Health and Safety News Division for Bloomberg BNA, on the most important energy and environmental issues of 2013.

India and China – “the two most important countries going forward in this century” – will both experience domestic concerns as a result of environmental change, but they are responding very differently, said Cleo Paskal, an associate fellow at Chatham House, in an interview with the Environment, Conflict, and Cooperation (ECC) Platform.

India’s Maoist (or “Naxalite”) insurgency has resulted in more than 9,000 deaths in the last decade and famously been called the country’s “single biggest internal security challenge” by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. In, Renewable Resource Shocks and Conflict in India’s Maoist Belt, a working paper for the Center for Global Development, Devesh Kapur, Kishore Gawande, and Shanker Satyanth present their econometric analysis of the conflict and suggest that there is a link with natural resource depletion.

“We are in the midst of a silent revolution,” said Ann Pawliczko, a senior technical advisor in the population and development branch at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), quoting former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. “It is a revolution that extends well beyond demographics, with major economic, social, cultural, psychological, and spiritual implications.”