Pekka Haavisto, a Member of the Finnish Parliament, thinks an objective scientific investigation of rumored toxic waste in Somalia would be both doable and politically useful. Haavisto, the former Finnish minister of environment, visited the Woodrow Wilson Center last week and spoke with the Environmental Change and Security Program’s director Geoff Dabelko.

“Incorporating environment, population, and health is a timely issue. Unless we focus on integrated approaches, our Ethiopian Millennium Development Goals cannot be achieved,” says Negash Teklu, executive director of the Consortium for Integration of Population, Health, and Environment (CIPHE), in this short video.

As evening fell upon Yirgalem, Ethiopia, more than 70 participants from a large cross-section of Ethiopia’s NGO community—as well as a few international participants like myself—gathered in a packed conference room in the Furra Institute for the second annual General Assembly of the Consortium for the Integration of Population, Health, and Environment (CIPHE).

“The landscape has changed since 2007,” says Alexander Carius of the climate change and international security debates now taking place in Europe. In this short video, Carius, who is managing director at Adelphi Research, discusses the progress made by institutionalizing communication within the European Commission as well as the formal and informal channels between the four member states leading the debate, Germany, Britain, Sweden, and Denmark. “Whether this debate is driven by science, I have my doubts,” said Carius.

The 19th annual Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) conference began today in the crisp autumn air of Madison, Wisconsin. ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko discusses Al Gore’s keynote address explicitly connecting climate change to national security issues, as well as his questions and expectations as the country’s premier gathering of environmental journalists gets underway.

“Environmental change is not just environment; people are responding to lots of different shocks and stresses simultaneously that really act together to affect capacity to respond,” said Karen O’Brien professor in the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo and chair of the Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) project. ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko spoke with O’Brien outside the GECHS conference in Oslo, Norway.

“We can adapt to climate change… and there are lots of opportunities for change, lots of things that would be harmonious with sustainable development,” said Neil Adger, a professor at the University of East Anglia and leading researcher on adaptation at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the UK. “But saying we can change and can adapt does not mean to say we necessarily will adapt to climate change.”

Assumptions about human behavior drive our knowledge of future global population trends. Demographers analyze population and other survey data in order to forecast trends, but uncertainty colors these projections.

In the 2008 Revision of World Population Prospects, the UN Population Division projects that our planet will grow to 9.15 billion people by 2050. Yet this medium-variant projection is just one of several possible scenarios released in this latest round of number crunching. The low- and high-variant projections—7.96 billion and 10.5 billion, respectively—could instead become reality, given slight shifts in fertility rates in developing countries, where growth rates remain higher than in more developed nations. Although both developing and developed nations are susceptible to shifts in fertility rates, uncertainties are greater in the developing world due to factors such as inconsistent data collection, weak health system infrastructure, and low government capacity.

Elizabeth Leahy and I investigate the underlying assumptions behind population projections in an article in the May/June edition of World Watch magazine. By comparing three of the leading population-forecasting institutions, we find that small variations in assumptions can lead to significant differences in projections.

Uganda’s demographic outlook is a prime example. Between 1960 and 2005, Uganda’s population grew by 22 million people, while the country’s fertility rate fell by less than 3 percent. The UN medium-variant population projection assumes the country will buck precedent and experience a 61 percent fertility rate decline between 2005 and 2050, resulting in a population of 91 million people. The U.S. Census Bureau, on the other hand, assumes a less drastic fertility decline and projects a population of 128 million people by 2050. The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), an Austrian institution that projects population on a regional basis, recently revised its population projections to reflect greater growth in sub-Saharan Africa due to stalling fertility decline and stagnant educational-attainment rates.

Fertility rates rarely decline when governments have not made the proper investments in health and education. The UN medium-variant projection is commonly cited as an inevitable scenario; few people know that one of its underlying assumptions is that access to modern contraception will continue to expand. Without real-world development investments to match these assumptions, a very different scenario could easily materialize. By empowering women, bolstering access to education, and providing comprehensive family-planning services to citizens, governments and policymakers can translate these assumptions into reality.