“In the eyes of many governments, population has, as we all know, been a rather uncomfortable topic for a number of years,” said Nobel Laureate Sir John Sulston, FRS, chair of the Institute for Science, Ethics, and Innovation at the University of Manchester and chair of the Royal Society’s People and the Planet working group. At an event at the Wilson Center on February 22, Sulston and his co-panelists, Martha Campbell, president of Venture Strategies for Health and Development, and Professor Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue of Cornell University, encouraged active debate on a range of population dynamics and their connections to economic, environmental, and political futures. [Video Below]

The original version of this article, by Farzaneh Roudi-Fahimi, Shereen El Feki, and Tyjen Tsai, appeared at the Population Reference Bureau.

Egyptians know some dates by heart: July 26, 1952, marks the overthrow of Egypt’s last monarch; October 6, 1973, is the date of the country’s attack to reclaim the Sinai Peninsula. Now another date can be added to that list: January 25, 2011, the first day of anti-government protests that led to President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation 18 days later. Mubarak ruled Egypt for nearly 30 years, during which the country’s population grew by 90 percent – from 45 million to 85 million according to UN estimates, despite concerted government campaigns to slow population growth. The demographic strength of Egypt is undeniable, not just in absolute numbers but in its age distribution. Egypt is experiencing a “youth bulge:” One in five Egyptians is between ages 15 and 24, and one-half of the population is below age 25 (see figure above), a powerful engine of renewal for the country.

“At the moment, the agendas of the growing population of people and the environment are too separate – people are thinking about one or the other,” said Sir John Sulston, Nobel laureate and chair of the Royal Society’s People and the Planet working group, in an interview with ECSP. “People argue about, ‘Should we consume less or should we have fewer people?’ The point is it’s both. We need to draw it together. It’s people and their activities.”

“The developing world is urbanizing at a dizzying pace,” yet rural populations living in developing countries are also rapidly increasing, threatening many of the planet’s most biodiverse regions, says a new study, Mapping Population onto Priority Conservation Areas, by David López-Carr, Matthew Erdman, and Alex Zvoleff.

“It’s increasingly clear that we are living in a pivotal moment,” said Laurie Mazur, director of the Population Justice Project, in this interview with ECSP about her new book, A Pivotal Moment: Population, Justice, and the Environmental Challenge. Currently, “nearly half the world’s population – about three billion people – are under the age of 25,” she said, and the choices these young people make, and the choices that are available to them “will determine whether world population grows from the current almost 6.9 billion to anywhere between 8 billion and 11 billion.”

“Numbers do matter,” said Mazur. “Clearly, a world population of 8 billion would be better than 11 billion for both human beings and the environment.” What’s more, “everything we need to do to slow population growth is something we should be doing anyway.”

Investments in family planning, girls’ education, women’s empowerment, and sustainable, equitable development are all means to slowing population growth, as well as being an end in and of themselves. Population growth “is an issue of really broad appeal” and should be of concern to environmental and reproductive health advocates, people of faith, or anyone who cares about development, justice, and eliminating poverty, said Mazur.

“Rural development and MCH [maternal child health] in the most remote, rural areas are going to largely explain the future of Latin American conservation, development, population, and urbanization,” said David Lopez-Carr, associate professor of geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara, at a recent Wilson Center roundtable on “Deforestation, Population, and Development in Latin America.”

“Health and Health-Care Systems in Southeast Asia: Diversity and Transitions,” launches a series in The Lancet on health in Southeast Asia. While social, political, and economic development have paved the way for substantial health improvements in some countries, demographic transitions are taking place at among the fastest rates in the world, including reductions in fertility, population aging, and rural-to-urban migration. An epidemiological shift is occurring as well, from infectious to chronic diseases. Rapid urbanization and population movement can not only affect the emergence and spread of new infectious diseases directly, but can also exacerbate environmental changes that indirectly contribute to the burden of waterborne and vector-borne diseases. The series, available early online, addresses these concerns in more detail. Moving forward, the authors advocate for “enhanced regional cooperation in the health sector to share knowledge and rationalize health systems operations, leading to further public health gains for the region’s diverse populations.”

Japan, the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and Korea are all aging societies. On February 26, the Wilson Center’s Asia Program hosted an event to consider issues related to demographic change in Northeast Asia. What will be the effect of aging on economic output in these countries? Can welfare states established for much younger populations in developed economies survive the stress of demographic change, or will governments in Northeast Asia need to radically rethink the provision of care to the elderly? Can immigration reform alleviate many of the problems associated with more elderly populations in Northeast Asia? And will current demographic shifts foster more benign or more belligerent interstate relations in the region?