Eight years from now, the Gaza Strip will have “virtually no reliable access to sources of safe drinking water, standards of healthcare and education will have continued to decline, and the vision of affordable and reliable electricity for all will have become a distant memory for most,” according to a United Nations report released last month. The bleak assessment concludes that without immediate action to address immense and interconnected economic, demographic, environmental, infrastructure, and social challenges facing Gazans, “the already high number of poor, marginalized and food-insecure people depending on assistance will not have changed, and in all likelihood will have increased.”

This summer, 26 countries and private donors met at the London Summit on Family Planning to pledge $2.6 billion to expand family planning services to 120 million more women in the poorest countries around the world. But while the summit renewed focus on reproductive health with its ambitious target, “we’re now at that point where we have to really sit down and work through” how to achieve that goal, said Julia Bunting of the UK’s Department for International Development at the Wilson Center on September 17. [Video Below]

The original version of this article, by Kate Gilles and Marissa Pine Yeakey, appeared on the Population Reference Bureau’s Behind the Numbers blog.

World Contraception Day “centers around a vision for a world where every pregnancy is wanted,” with a goal of enabling “young people to make informed choices on their sexual and reproductive health.”

Following the steady economic growth that many African countries have experienced in recent years and continued population growth, urbanization has accelerated rapidly on the continent as people turn to cities to take advantage of new economic opportunities. But growing cities have led to another problem. According to a new Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report, Growing Greener Cities in Africa, urban populations are exceeding the capacity of African cities to provide food for them, putting nearly 300 million people at risk of hunger and malnutrition, and greener strategies – urban agriculture and better water use – could help considerably.

“Over the past several months, extreme weather and climate events seemed to have become the norm rather than the exception,” writes Kelly Levin for the World Resources Institute (WRI). Indeed, records have been broken around the world as countries experience unprecedented heat, drought, flooding, or other types of severe weather. And people are starting to take notice. A number of recent stories try to make sense of this wild weather and what, if anything, it has to do with climate change.

People are still talking about this summer’s London Summit on Family Planning, which was hosted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK’s Department of International Development (DIFD) on July 11. On Monday here at the Wilson Center, the Environmental Change and Security Program featured representatives from USAID, DFID, and Gates Foundation for a standing-room only panel discussion of the landmark event.

The original version of this article, by Simon Zadek, appeared on Project Syndicate.

The elderly are a crucial link in the chain that binds generations and sustains civilized society. Today, however, older people are largely considered to be out of touch with the modern, technology-driven world, and incapable of paying their own way. But much evidence shows otherwise: If aging were framed as an economic opportunity, the growing number of older people worldwide could become modernity’s gift, rather than society’s burden.

The poorest households gain the least when countries reap the demographic dividend, according to a preliminary draft of a new study by four Harvard School of Public Health researchers. In “Microeconomic Foundations of the Demographic Dividend,” authors David Bloom, David Canning, Günther Fink, and Jocelyn Finlay write that 18 years of Demographic Health Surveys (DHSs) from 60 developing countries show that while declining fertility rates and dependency ratios can lead to rising incomes on a nationwide level, sub-nationally those trends occur unevenly and mostly benefit wealthier households. Poorer households, meanwhile, are likelier to see slower fertility declines, delaying the economic gains that can result from demographic transitions, and increasing inequality. Importantly, the authors emphasize that the study reflects “the early stages of the demographic transition”; long-term economic effects of fertility decline, they write, “remain ambiguous.”