As world population pushes towards nine billion by mid-century and millions are elevated to the global middle class every year, demand for water continues to grow as well. More people need more water for drinking and household use, but also for agriculture, mining, energy, and industry. With water often cited as a limit to growth and potential crisis point, the World Resources Institute has released the Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas, which details various types of water stress around the world in impressively detailed fashion.

Dialogue at the Wilson Center tackled demography and the environment last week, interviewing Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former Wilson Center public policy scholar Caryle Murphy about her new book, A Kingdom’s Future: Saudi Arabia Through the Eyes of Its Twentysomethings, followed by John Sullivan, director of the Environment and Health and Safety News Division for Bloomberg BNA, on the most important energy and environmental issues of 2013.

One year ago, the United States government froze all property of the Central Bank of Iran and other Iranian financial institutions within the United States. The move was part of a broader effort to compel the Islamic Republic to give up its alleged nuclear weapons program. How is it working out?

In a new book from the Wilson Center, Caryle Murphy asks how, while its neighbors face revolutions, Saudi Arabia has been able to “weather the storm of Arab youth discontent seemingly unscathed.”

To find out, Murphy went to the source, interviewing 83 young Saudis between the ages of 19 and 29 in the spring of 2012. She found that “they are by no means a revolutionary lot, preferring gradual, step-by-step change. They want change, but not at the cost of safety and security. Most favor more tolerance for diversity, including in the realm of religion.”

The Wilson Center Policy Briefs are a series of short analyses of critical global issues facing the next administration that will run until inauguration day.

Seven billion people now live on Earth, only a dozen years after the global population hit six billion. But this milestone is not about sheer numbers. Demographic trends will significantly affect the planet’s resources and people’s security.

The CIA may have shut down its dedicated climate change center earlier this year, but a recently released report sponsored by the intelligence community reaffirms the deep connection between climate change and national security. New threats to U.S. national security – like increased food and water insecurity and more natural disasters requiring humanitarian assistance – have emerged as climate change creates unprecedented changes in the global environment.

“We are at a critical juncture in human history, which could lead to widely contrasting futures,” writes the chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC) Christopher Kojm in the council’s latest forward-looking quadrennial report, Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, released yesterday.

This year, principal author Mathew Burrows and his colleagues focus on a series of plausible global scenarios for the next 20 years and the trends or disruptions that may influence which play out. Among the most important factors in these projections are demography and the environment.