Two studies push back on recent analyses that claim to demonstrate empirical links between food aid and conflict and climate change and conflict.

“A world in which a quarter of humanity is denied full enjoyment of their rights is an unjust world,” said Kate Gilmore, deputy executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). “It’s a world without the building blocks for human progress, for human peace, for human security.” [Video Below]

“We cannot ignore the new reality that climate change has become a major foreign policy issue in the 21^st century,” a new film by Hal and Marilyn Weiner concludes.

Global population growth is so rapid that even the most severe crises imaginable would still leave the planet with more people than it can sustainably support, according to a recent study by the University of Adelaide’s Corey Bradshaw and Barry Brook published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

With UN demographers more certain than ever that global population will reach between 10 and 12 billion by the end of the century, the challenge of building a sustainable future seems daunting. But according to Wolfgang Lutz, founding director of the Vienna-based Wittgenstein Center for Demography and Global Human Capital, these projections miss one crucial variable: increasing levels of education. [Video Below]

“Sub-Saharan Africa’s young people are in effect the global labor force of the future,” said Jack Goldstone at the Wilson Center on October 15. “Whether they are productive, how large that cohort turns out to be, whether they find work or not, is going to have a bearing, I think, on all of us.” [Video Below]