The world is undergoing a period of demographic transition which presents both opportunities and challenges for governments. A report by the Atlantic Council’s Mathew Burrows, formerly of the National Intelligence Council, Reducing the Risks from Rapid Demographic Change, examines the changes in population structures across high-, upper-middle-, lower-middle-, and low-income countries.

On October 13, the United Nations General Assembly appointed Antonio Guterres as the next UN secretary-general. When the former prime minister of Portugal and high commissioner for refugees begins his term in January 2017, he will face a world of increasing climate and security crises. In a Wilson Center NOW interview and op-ed for The Daily Climate, Wilson Fellows Ruth Greenspan Bell and Sherri Goodman express optimism in Guterres’ ability to address these interconnected challenges and provide insight on the role of institutions like the United Nations in fighting climate change.

“Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time and it calls for a comprehensive and cooperative international approach like we’ve never seen,” said Jainey Bavishi, associate director for climate preparedness at the White House Council on Environmental Policy, at the Wilson Center on October 5. “The leadership of the island nations is essential; they punch well above their weight on this issue.”

If China is the globe’s most powerful manufacturing engine, the port of Shanghai is its fuel injection valve. This harbor is the world’s busiest, both in terms of tonnage and number of containers processed, allowing China to import the raw materials fueling its development and export the products that represent a significant share of the world’s economy.

A traditional conservation approach to climate change (e.g., habitat restoration, species protection) has been a primary tenet of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) agenda for decades. But this fall at the quadrennial World Conservation Congress in Hawai’i there were new discussions about tackling climate change in the context of national security and environmental peacebuilding.

In 1990, the U.S. Congress passed the Global Change Research Act “to assist the Nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change.” Under this mandate, the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) was born, an innovative, cross-cutting research initiative that brings together the science arms of 13 federal agencies working on global change issues, including the Departments of Agriculture, Interior, Energy, Defense, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and others.

Nestled in the mountains of western Sichuan Province sits the town of Piankou. Surrounded by three nature reserves that contain several hundred giant pandas, the landscape is undeniably beautiful. Rivers crash their way through rocky valleys framed by bamboo covered hills. But the scene was not always so tranquil.