For some time, it has been clear that a global population imbalance is emerging. High income countries, including nearly all of the Americas, Europe, and most of East and parts of South and Southeast Asia, have seen a dramatic, sustained fall in fertility. Already, this is resulting in shrinking labor forces and the oldest mean age populations seen in history. At the same time, the low income countries and even some lower middle-income countries—mainly in Africa but also in Central America, the Middle East, and parts of South and Southeast Asia—continue to have relatively high fertility. This is now, and even more in the coming decades, producing fast-growing labor forces and relatively young populations.

Evidence of the effects of climate change continues to mount. We see it in extreme weather events, including droughts and intense hurricanes and cyclones, in biodiversity loss, and in erratic weather patterns around the globe. While many of these impacts rightfully make it into front-page news, climate change is also profoundly affecting parts of our planet that we do not understand well—the ocean and the cryosphere.

In September 2019, the International Panel on Climate Change issued a Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC). The report provides a new and sobering analysis of current conditions, as well as projections into the future. Produced by more than 100 authors from 36 countries, the SROCC painstakingly reviews the latest scientific literature, referencing some 7,000 scientific publications in all.

If you have even a passing familiarity with the climate and security literature, you undoubtedly have come across the phrase “threat multiplier.” The phrase conveys the idea that climate change intersects with other factors to contribute to security problems. It’s used as short-hand to avoid the charge of environmental determinism, that climate change somehow on its own causes negative security outcomes.

The 2007 CNA Military Advisory Board (MAB) report on climate security introduced this formulation and, at the time, it served the purpose of recognizing that there is a link between climate change and security. But research on climate security has progressed and so must our framing of the risks and needed interventions.

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.