As recently discussed by the National Intelligence Council, sub-Saharan Africa is home to both the most rapidly growing populations in the world and its fastest expanding cities. Save the Children’s recent report, Voices From Urban Africa: The Impact of Urban Growth on Children, explores the challenges faced by the continent’s youngest age cohort, revealing what forces are driving children and families to migrate to urban areas and the poverty many are experiencing upon getting there. In response to the report’s findings, the authors recommend training and deploying more health care workers, facilitating public-private dialogue to identify long-term water and sanitation solutions, improving access to jobs and skills training, expanding access to early childhood care, and strengthening the education system to ensure widespread attendance. Compiled from 1,050 interviews, the report is unique for its first-hand accounts of the daily lives of children, their families, and community members.

If 2011 was the year of political demography, then 2012 was perhaps when the full intersection of natural resource management, population dynamics, development, and security came into focus. The U.S. drought; global food price spikes; the return of famine in the Sahel and Horn of Africa; continued unrest in youthful countries across the Middle East; the Rio+20 and London Family Planning summits; new oil and mineral development in unstable countries; and increasingly more noticeable climate change around the world – all were big stories that brought the intersection of these issues to the forefront.

Did Hurricane Sandy change the discussion about climate change in the United States? In this latest episode of the Wilson Center’s Dialogue program, Senior Wilson Center Advisor and Ohio University Professor Geoff Dabelko joins host John Milewski to discuss the potential impact of Sandy on climate policy and dialogue in the United States with Darryl Fears (The Washington Post) and Bob Deans (Natural Resources Defense Council).

The Wilson Center Policy Briefs are a series of short analyses of critical global issues facing the next administration that will run until inauguration day.

We live in a world that is different from that inhabited by our ancestors in many profound ways. Among the most important changes is that, for the first time, almost half of the world’s people live in cities. According to the United Nations, in 2008 the global urban population surpassed half of the world’s population of 6.7 billion compared with 13 percent a century ago and 3 percent a century before that. This trend will require profound changes in the way the U.S. government addresses everything from development policy to international security.

Carbon offsets have fallen in and out of favor since they were established with the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. Critics say they allow wealthy organizations to placate consumers and claim their products are “green” without making any real, lasting changes. But, if the scheme works properly, some action is supposed to be taken somewhere, so what is it like at one of these credit-producing organizations?

Population growth “is highly concentrated in what are today the poorest and least well-governed areas of the world,” said George Mason University professor Jack Goldstone at the Wilson Center on December 5.

Goldstone was joined by Suzanne Ehlers, president and CEO of Population Action International (PAI), and Matthew Erdman, population-health-environment technical advisor at USAID, to discuss the implications of seven billion people and counting for the environment as part of the joint Wilson Center-George Mason University Managing the Planet series. [Video Below]

One of the greatest challenges in addressing climate change is the uncertainty of outcomes. The world is warming and greenhouse gases are accumulating at an unprecedented rate – what does that mean for the future of human development? In Barry B. Hughes, Mohammod T. Irfan, Jonathan D. Moyer, Dale S. Rothman, and José R. Solórzano’s paper, “Exploring Future Impacts of Environmental Constraints on Human Development,” they describe three possible futures for the world (a base line scenario, an environmental challenge scenario, and an environmental disaster scenario) and their potential impact on the indicators of the Human Development Index (HDI). The environmental disaster projection features a flat-lining HDI starting around 2015, with global life expectancy at birth seven years shorter than the baseline in 2060. The report also notes that the future of the planet will be drastically different if the world population peaks “well before 2100,” as is the case in the base line scenario, or continues to grow, as it does in the other scenarios.

“There is as much of that water on the planet today as when the first amphibian flopped ashore; as much as when the ancient Greeks divined the future in the babble of brooks,” writes William Wheeler in The Christian Science Monitor. “So why do experts in science, economics, and development warn that a ‘global water crisis’ threatens the stability of nations and the health of billions?”