Water is a “strategic instrument in the creation of a safer, healthier, more nutritious, less aggressive world,” said Winrock International President and CEO Rodney Ferguson at the first event in a four-part series on water security organized by the Wilson Center and the Sustainable Water Partnership. Panelists at the event identified innovative and integrated efforts necessary to increase global water security in the face of growing water scarcity.

Over the past 25 years, economic and political demographers have documented how declines in fertility rates have preceded improvements in state capacity, income, and political stability in much of East Asia, Latin America, and, most recently, in the Maghreb region of North Africa (Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria). Nonetheless, social scientists still debate over where and when this “demographic dividend” will occur in the youthful, low-income countries of sub-Saharan Africa.  Elizabeth Leahy Madsen of the Population Reference Bureau and I find that, for most youthful countries—like those in sub-Saharan Africa—changes in population age structure provide a means to gauge the timing of their future development.

As the climate changes, cities will suffer. “These are important places that have a lot of people, property, and local economies that are going to struggle,” said Jessica Grannis, the adaptation program manager at Georgetown’s Climate Center, at a recent Wilson Center event on the role of subnational decision-makers in achieving international goals.  “The good news is that, here in the United States, many cities are recognizing these threats to their people and populations, and they’re beginning to take action,” said Grannis.

While attention in the United States is focused on the disasters in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, a crisis across the Atlantic is rapidly becoming one of the worst humanitarian disasters since World War II. In the Lake Chad basin of West Africa, about 17 million people are affected by the emergency, struggling with food insecurity, widespread violence, involuntary displacement, and the consequences of environmental degradation. An estimated 800,000 children suffer from acute malnutrition; and although international donors pledged $672 million in February, the famine and humanitarian misery continues unabated. Suicide bombings and attacks by Boko Haram, which have killed at least 381 civilians since April 2017, have forced many people to leave their homes and farmers to leave their lands, interrupting livelihoods and reducing food supplies.

From 1870 to 2015, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere  increased significantly, said Professor Maria Sanz, scientific director at the Basque Center for Climate Change in a recent webinar organized by WWF Forest and Climate. Forests have been responsible for global greenhouse gas emissions through forestry and other land use activities. However, she noted that forests also absorb nearly one-third of the emissions generated from fossil fuels.

Girls and women bear the brunt of climate change impacts. Natural disasters kill more women than men: an estimated 90 percent of those killed in some weather-related disasters were female. The effects of climate change on natural resources can also further exacerbate existing gender inequalities.  Girls may be kept out of school to fetch water, as droughts drive them to walk farther and farther to find it. Seeking to stretch scarce household resources, families may marry off their daughters before the legal age and they may become more vulnerable to human trafficking after natural disasters.

The 1-2-3 punch of hurricanes Irma, Harvey, and Maria has made it devastatingly clear that extreme weather events can and will destroy families, interrupt livelihoods, and tear apart communities, particularly in coastal and low-lying areas of vulnerable regions like the Caribbean and the United States. 

The future of global security will depend in large part on the fate of today’s 1.2 billion young people. Do youth between the ages of 15 and 24—a critical phase of life—possess  the necessary social, physical, intellectual, and financial building blocks to underpin productive, healthy adulthoods? Or do they lack this solid base, putting them at risk of personal and social instability?