December and January were busy months. The U.S. National Intelligence Council released their latest quadrennial Global Trends Report, we saw a progress report on USAID’s Feed the Future Initiative, and Typhoon Bopha showed why developing countries are so vulnerable to climate change. Laurie Mazur also responded to Blair A. Ruble’s Wilson Center policy brief on 21st century urbanization with a look at how sustainable cities really are, and we heard from Ethiopia’s PHE community about the challenges of project monitoring and evaluation. Some past-year favorites emerged again as well, with Yemen’s demography, a look at Mongolia’s mining boom, and a great map of the world’s exclusive economic zones.

ECSP Senior Advisor and Ohio University Professor Geoff Dabelko appeared on Marketplace yesterday to comment on Defense Secretary Nominee Chuck Hagel’s confirmation hearings and whether the Pentagon’s pursuit of renewable energy and other “green” technologies might enter the discussion.

In a new book from the Wilson Center, Caryle Murphy asks how, while its neighbors face revolutions, Saudi Arabia has been able to “weather the storm of Arab youth discontent seemingly unscathed.”

To find out, Murphy went to the source, interviewing 83 young Saudis between the ages of 19 and 29 in the spring of 2012. She found that “they are by no means a revolutionary lot, preferring gradual, step-by-step change. They want change, but not at the cost of safety and security. Most favor more tolerance for diversity, including in the realm of religion.”

Rich, untapped deposits of gold, iron, copper, lithium, and rare earth minerals have been known in Afghanistan for decades, but recently, extensive reports from the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Geological Survey have shed new light on their potential value.

If 2011 was the year of political demography, then 2012 was perhaps when the full intersection of natural resource management, population dynamics, development, and security came into focus. The U.S. drought; global food price spikes; the return of famine in the Sahel and Horn of Africa; continued unrest in youthful countries across the Middle East; the Rio+20 and London Family Planning summits; new oil and mineral development in unstable countries; and increasingly more noticeable climate change around the world – all were big stories that brought the intersection of these issues to the forefront.

The CIA may have shut down its dedicated climate change center earlier this year, but a recently released report sponsored by the intelligence community reaffirms the deep connection between climate change and national security. New threats to U.S. national security – like increased food and water insecurity and more natural disasters requiring humanitarian assistance – have emerged as climate change creates unprecedented changes in the global environment.

“We are at a critical juncture in human history, which could lead to widely contrasting futures,” writes the chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC) Christopher Kojm in the council’s latest forward-looking quadrennial report, Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, released yesterday.

This year, principal author Mathew Burrows and his colleagues focus on a series of plausible global scenarios for the next 20 years and the trends or disruptions that may influence which play out. Among the most important factors in these projections are demography and the environment.

“There is as much of that water on the planet today as when the first amphibian flopped ashore; as much as when the ancient Greeks divined the future in the babble of brooks,” writes William Wheeler in The Christian Science Monitor. “So why do experts in science, economics, and development warn that a ‘global water crisis’ threatens the stability of nations and the health of billions?”