“One of the major lessons of 9/11 is that even superpowers can be vulnerable to the grievances emanating from failed and failing states,” said Colin Kahl, now deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, at an ECSP event at the Wilson Center in October 2007. However, “if poverty and inequality were enough to lead to widespread civil strife, the entire world would be on fire.”

“I think any in-depth examination of particular cases shows that there’s a complex interaction between demographic pressures, environmental degradation and scarcity, and structural and economic scarcities – that they tend to interact and reinforce one another in a kind of vicious circle,” Kahl said.

“It’s really important to keep in mind that any attempt to address…environmental and demographic factors should focus not just on preventing environmental degradation, or slowing population growth, or increasing public health. They must also focus on those intervening variables in the middle that make certain societies and countries more resilient in the face of crisis.”

The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes.

“The UN projects about 9.1 billion people by 2050, and then population growth will likely level off around 9.5 billion later in the century. Can the planet handle 9 billion? The answer is probably yes. Is it a desirable trajectory? The answer is no,” said John Bongaarts, vice president of the Policy Research Division at the Population Council, in this interview with ECSP.

Although family planning was largely brushed aside by international policymakers following the 1994 UN International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Bongaarts said he is hopeful because it is now enjoying a higher profile globally – and receiving greater funding.

“I am optimistic about the understanding now, both in developing and developed world, and in the donor community, that [family planning] is an important issue that should be getting more attention,” Bongaarts said. “And therefore I think the chances of ending up with a positive demographic outlook are now larger than they were a few years ago.”

The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes.

“We know that when that when we empower women – whether it’s giving them control over their bodies and access to family planning or whether it’s by including them in planning around climate change – their agency can make huge leaps for us,” said Tamara Kreinin, executive director of women and population at the UN Foundation, in this interview with ECSP.

Seventy percent of the world’s poor are women and they’re also the members of the household most likely to be responsible for food, water, and firewood collection.

“At the same time, we know that women are often not at the table,” she said. “They’re not at the table in country when countries are creating aid to adaptation strategies around the environment and climate change, and they’re not at the table at places like Copenhagen and some of the big climate change meetings.”

The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes.

“Demographics are going to be to the 21st century what class cleavages were to the 19th century,” said Christian Leuprecht in this conversation with the Environmental Change and Security Program. Leuprecht is an assistant professor at the Royal Military College of Canada and was one of the authors featured in ECSP Report 13.

“Specifically with regards to demography and security, the challenge that I see is at the sub-national level. That is to say that most of the conflict, if you look around the world – the intractable conflicts, the violent conflicts, the conflicts that have been dragging on for decades – tend to be at the sub-national level,” he said. “Yet much of the academic work and the way data are gathered are at the national level.”

The “Pop Audio” series offers brief clips from ECSP’s conversations with experts around the world, sharing analysis and promoting dialogue on population-related issues. Also available on iTunes.

Today marks the release of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) annual State of the World Population Report. But the 2010 edition, “From Conflict and Crisis to Renewal: Generations of Change,” is unlike those that have come before. In lieu of the traditional statistic-driven report, this year’s edition has enlisted another tool to document living conditions across the world — storytelling. In addition to demographers, the UNFPA looked to journalists to fan out across the world to gather stories on the ground and paint a portrait of the challenges and opportunities facing today’s global population that goes beyond the numbers, with particular focus on gender issues and human insecurity.

“Particularly when you go into a society that’s been broken by war or conflict or is so impoverished that is has nowhere to start climbing up, there have to be integrated programs and they have to work with people in mind,” said former New York Times foreign correspondent Barbara Crossette in an interview with The New Security Beat. “The people themselves will solve a lot of the problems around them if they’re just given the tools to do so.”

Crossette is one of the lead authors of the UN Population Fund’s latest State of the World Population Report, “From Conflict and Crisis to Renewal: Generations of Change,” set to launch this Wednesday, October 20th. She spoke to us particularly about the challenges of women around the world and the unique storytelling aspect of this year’s report.

The “Pop Audio” series offers brief clips from ECSP’s conversations with experts around the world, sharing analysis and promoting dialogue on population-related issues. Also available on iTunes.

“Right now, half the world’s population – some 3 billion people – are under the age of 25,” began Laurie Mazur on the “Population, Climate, and Consumption” panel at the Society for Environmental Journalists 20th Annual Conference. “It’s the largest generation ever that’s coming of age, and the choices that those young men and women make about childbearing will determine whether world population…grows to anywhere between 8 and 11 billion by the middle of this century.”

“The good news is that everything we need to do to slow population growth is something we should be doing anyway,” she continued. Mazur is the author of A Pivotal Moment: Population, Justice, and the Environmental Challenge and director of the Population Justice Project.

She was joined on the panel by Brian O’Neill, who spoke about a new study examining the impact of demographics on carbon emissions, and Jack Liu, who spoke about the impact of household size on emissions in China.

The “Pop Audio” series offers brief clips from ECSP’s conversations with experts around the world, sharing analysis and promoting dialogue on population-related issues. Also available on iTunes.

After a Wilson Center Global Health Initiative event last year, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof spoke with ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko about the importance of maternal health issues and what can be done about it.

“You just know that if men had uteruses and were dying at this rate, every country would have a Minister of Paternal Mortality, the Security Council would be meeting…this would be a real international priority,” said Kristof. “It just should not happen that one woman dies a minute for reproducing.” He recently revisited this topic with a column titled, “Birth Control Over Baldness.”

The “Pop Audio” series offers brief clips from ECSP’s conversations with experts around the world, sharing analysis and promoting dialogue on population-related issues. Also available on iTunes.