“My author bio says I cover energy, environment, and reproductive rights,” said Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones in an interview with ECSP. “One of the biggest challenges in covering that beat is even just articulating what that means.”

Fundamentally, Sheppard said she is interested in covering how policy decisions shape the future, which involves examining the intersections between these key issues. She spoke at a November 1 Wilson Center event on the challenges of reporting on population and environment, especially this year, when a great deal of media covered the world population reaching seven billion.

The UN Population Fund established World Population Day as a day of awareness about global population in 1987. As we approach seven billion just 24 years later, the UN is kicking off their 7 Billion Actions campaign, designed to raise awareness about the resource, health, and environmental challenges raised by our numbers. Population and its more detailed cousin-indicator, demography, impact the world in a great many ways – from contributing to resource scarcity and environmental destruction to creating social imbalances that can lead to civil instability.

Numbers swirl around climate change.

So many parts per million of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So many gigatons of carbon dioxide emitted. So many degrees Celsius of temperature rise that we hope won’t happen. Yet one number rarely comes into play when experts or negotiators talk about the changing atmosphere and the warming of the planet: the number of humans putting heat-trapping gases into the air.

From 20-22 September 2010, world leaders will meet in New York City to discuss the United Nations’ “We Can End Poverty 2015” Millennium Development Goals, which include food security, maternal and child health, and environmental sustainability as key objectives, but controversially, make no mention of population. Officially, there is only one small “side session,” organized by Vicky Markham of the Center for Environment and Population, devoted to talking about the MDGs in the integrated context of population, health, and environment (PHE).

What about climate change will impact us? That’s the question the Navy’s Task Force Climate Change is trying to answer. Rear Admiral David Titley explains the task force’s objectives in this interview by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) at their recent “Climate Change and National Security” event on the Hill.

According to the United Nations, 74 million acres of farmland in the developing world were acquired by foreign governments and investors over the first half of 2009 – an amount equal to half of Europe’s farmland.

To communicate a sense of urgency, the security paradigm is being used to push for self-sufficiency in energy, and hence “national security,” at COP-15. Such a connection, if configured with carbon-free energy sources, could provide a win-win outcome for many.

This argument has been embraced both by the left and the right of the political spectrum in the United States. But compelling as it may be politically, there is a discomforting insularity and isolationism embedded in this approach, as emphasized by the delegations from some countries that export fuels (e.g., OPEC members, emergent oil and gas economies, and uranium exporters such as Namibia and Niger).

The Canadian delegation, which was targeted by activists with a “fossil of the day” award, used the security argument to show how it could send relatively “conflict-free” fuels to the United States by developing its oil, uranium, and bituminous tar sands.

Australia played a similar security card behind the scenes. The former Environment Minister Robert Hill also served as defense minister and is now head of Australia’s Carbon Trust–connections which he suggested were very valuable in an onsite interview with journalist Giles Parkinson.

Nuclear energy was prominently discussed as a solution by numerous delegations. At a side event organized by the Danish Federation of Industries, Energy Secretary and Nobel physicist Steven Chu indicated that his biggest concern about nuclear energy was not the waste problem but rather, the potential dangers to national security from the proliferation of radioactive materials.

The other security connection that environmentalists like to make–but is empirically more tenuous–concerns the increased pressures on existing strife in resource-scarce communities potentially inflicted by climate change. I attended a presentation by an OECD research team that empirically considered the impact of climate change on the security of the vulnerable states of the African Sahel. While generally rejecting the direct linkage between climate change and the threat of violent conflict, the OECD study, launched with UK Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti, identified three hotspots where existing resource scarcity and population pressure could be exacerbated by climate change, especially agropastoralist communities, who are highly sensitive to any climatic fluctuations.

So far, the rather meandering encounter with the security agenda I’ve witnessed here in Copenhagen could greatly benefit from further integrative work such as that offered by the Wilson Center.

Saleem H. Ali is associate professor of environmental planning at the University of Vermont and the author most recently of Treasures of the Earth: Need, Greed and a Sustainable Future.