A new law in Peru encouraging investment in the country’s extractive industries has reignited debate on the lack of power indigenous women have in the mostly rural societies where they often live. The International Indigenous Women’s Forum, which drew more than 60 native women from across the world to Peru last month, highlighted this important issue.

As global environmental change accelerates, understanding how population dynamics affect the environment is more important than ever. It seems obvious that human-caused climate change has at least something to do with the quadrupling of world population over the last 100 years.

My grandmother was pleased when I told her I was heading to Ethiopia last November for an international conference focused on population, health, and the environment.

Since 2005, the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation program (REDD+) has functioned as a mechanism to financially incentivize the preservation of forestlands in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But beyond its original use, some organizations have also started exploring ways it can help with other development initiatives, like women’s empowerment. [Video Below]

Rapid population growth can be a contributing factor to climate change vulnerability and should be considered in climate adaptation and peacebuilding efforts, said the Wilson Center’s Roger-Mark De Souza at a workshop on climate change adaptation and peacebuilding hosted by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) in Addis Ababa.

Since the start of the Industrial Revolution some 250 years ago, the widespread use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides that began about a century and a half later and the atomic half-life of the past seven decades, humans have developed and doused land and dammed and diverted water. These practices have left a wound that continues to fester as the human population swells.