The world is undergoing a period of demographic transition which presents both opportunities and challenges for governments. A report by the Atlantic Council’s Mathew Burrows, formerly of the National Intelligence Council, Reducing the Risks from Rapid Demographic Change, examines the changes in population structures across high-, upper-middle-, lower-middle-, and low-income countries.

When Lake Poopó, Bolivia’s second-largest lake, dried up last December, an entire community lost their way of life and the scientific community cast their eyes to the map asking, where next? They didn’t have to look far. According to a report prepared by the World Lake Vision Committee, a collaboration between the International Lake Committee Foundation, the Shiga Prefectural Government of Japan, and the United Nations Environment Program, there are very few major lake systems that are not experiencing decreasing water quality, volume, biodiversity, or some combination of the three.

Yesterday afternoon President Obama announced a new Presidential Memorandum on climate change and national security. The policy directs 20 federal agencies to consider the national security implications of climate change and establish a working group that will develop a Climate Change and National Security Action Plan for the federal government.

When wildfires become unstoppable, consuming forests, farmlands, communities, and anything else in their path, how will those affected cope? When typhoons slam coastal populations, dumping over a foot of rain in a single event, who will be there to help mop up? When seas rise up, drowning centuries-old communities, where will the displaced go?

Conflict is typically viewed as a failure of social and political systems and almost never as a method of transforming dysfunctional or fractured societies into cohesive units. However, in an analysis of the discourse around climate change and conflict in Local Environment, Melissa Nursey-Bray concludes that conflict is a sometimes-necessary step in a complicated process to create stable societies. Nursey-Bray separates the climate-conflict discourse into two baskets: climate change as a security risk and climate change as one of many factors that contribute to insecurity.

More often than not in the discourse around gender and climate change, the word “gender” is used primarily to refer to women. There is no disputing that women are acutely vulnerable to the effects of climate change in ways that are different than men and sometimes hidden. However, this interchangeable use of words neglects other dimensions of gender, sexual orientation, and sexual identity. As a result, we are missing important ways gender impacts people’s experiences with climate change.

With so much focus on global environmental problems, many may wonder how their region is faring more specifically. This is the sentiment behind the United Nations Environment Program’s process for the latest iteration of its flagship assessment, the Global Environmental Outlook 6 (GEO-6). [Video Below]

“There are truly global-scale environmental challenges, and they need to be dealt with by thinking of solutions at the same scale,” said Thomas Lovejoy, a senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation, at the Wilson Center on June 29. The interaction between human population and environmental degradation is one of these challenges. [Video Below]