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.

The May edition of Reproductive Health Matters is a special edition on sustainable development and reproductive health and rights. Our own Roger-Mark De Souza writes that in the quest to build resilience, development practitioners can learn from integrated population, health, and environment (PHE) programs.

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]

Over the last two decades, social accountability has emerged as a strategy to make health services more responsive to community needs. It’s an approach that creates a space for “interaction between citizen engagement and government responsiveness,” said Jonathan Fox, professor of international development at American University at the Wilson Center May 5. [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.

“We have a fairly unique moment in the history of the world,” said Steven Philip Kramer, a professor at National Defense University, at the Wilson Center on April 17. “There’s never been a time when people have voluntarily produced fewer children than is necessary for sustaining the population.” [Video Below]

In 2012, the government of Kenya passed a landmark policy to manage its rapid population growth. The new population policy aims to reduce the number of children a woman has over her lifetime from five in 2009 to 3 by 2030. The policy also includes targets for child mortality, maternal mortality, life expectancy, and other reproductive health measures.