In most parts of the world, population growth is stagnant, even declining slightly, part of a decades-long and nearly universal shift towards smaller, healthier families. But the places where growth is still rapid continue to defy expectations about when they will “catch up.”

In 1968, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich predicted hundreds of millions would starve to death over the next decade, many of them Americans, and the world would generally decline into chaos in his book The Population Bomb.

If you were on a mission to improve the plight of humankind, no less, would you care about how many people are living, where they are, and how old they are? You probably would, for it would obviously make it easier for you to estimate the challenge you face. However, the international community did not.

Hans Rosling has always been an innovator when it comes to bringing big ideas to big audiences. The Norwegian doctor, statistician, and co-founder of the Gapminder Foundation has become known – to the kind of people who watch TED Talks anyway – for lively presentations aimed at demystifying common ideas about global development and demography. On Gapminder.org, he literally stands chest-high in water appealing for your donation to help him “cross the river of myths.”

With intense drought in Sao Paulo and California, devastating floods in Malawi, and escalating water-energy confrontations in many developing countries, it is no wonder water is making headlines. It’s also gained the attention of the World Economic Forum (WEF), which lists water crises as the world’s number one risk in its recently released Global Risk Assessment.

“Political demography is a discipline whose time has come,” said Rob Odell of the National Intelligence Council at a gathering of demographers and researchers in New Orleans. “You can sense this inherent dissatisfaction” with a lot of analytical and predictive tools in international relations, he said, and “political demography provides policymakers a way to think about long-term trends.”