“Population is critical to thinking about sustainability and human wellbeing, and how we live and subsist on the planet,” says ECSP’s Roger-Mark De Souza on this World Population Day.

As the largest-ever generation of young people enters adulthood, armed conflict is having a profound effect on their future. People under the age of 24 comprise nearly half the world’s population but are the primary participants in conflict today. Conflict is more prevalent in younger societies, and half of all forcibly displaced people are children.

My grandmother was pleased when I told her I was heading to Ethiopia last November for an international conference focused on population, health, and the environment.

“You can look into the future a couple decades and get a very good idea about where countries are going,” said Richard Cincotta during a presentation at the National Defense University last summer – at least when it comes to demography.

The May edition of Reproductive Health Matters is a special edition on sustainable development and reproductive health and rights. Our own Roger-Mark De Souza writes that in the quest to build resilience, development practitioners can learn from integrated population, health, and environment (PHE) programs.

Despite the threat posed by flooding and sea-level rise, relatively little attention has been paid to the potential for environmentally induced instability in coastal West African cities. However, current trends, including rapid population growth, land use patterns, and increasing climate impacts, suggest the costs of inaction in these urban areas are rising.

When she finished her dissertation on migration as a response to climate change in 2003, it was one of only a handful of scholarly papers published on the topic that year, said Susana Adamo, an associate research scientist at Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network. But in the decade since, interest in climate migration has exploded – in 2012, more than 10 times as many papers were published. [Video Below]