“We are in the midst of a silent revolution,” said Ann Pawliczko, a senior technical advisor in the population and development branch at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), quoting former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. “It is a revolution that extends well beyond demographics, with major economic, social, cultural, psychological, and spiritual implications.”

To encourage a new generation of urban policymakers and promote early career research, the Wilson Center’s Comparative Urban Studies Project, USAID, the International Housing Coalition, the World Bank, and Cities Alliance are co-sponsoring a fourth annual paper competition for graduate- and PhD-level students focused on the challenges facing urban centers in the developing world.

This year, Texas-based Anadarko and Italian partner ENI are due to make the final investment decision on whether to construct one of the largest liquefied natural gas facilities in the world in Mozambique. The complex would allow them to tap into deep off-shore gas fields that could rival Australia and Qatar as the largest liquefied natural gas reserves in the world.

“We chose the Philippines because we really wanted to do a story that looked at population growth,” reporter Sam Eaton says of his two-part contribution to the Food for Nine Billion project, which aired last year on PBS’ NewsHour and American Public Media’s Marketplace. Eaton recently visited the Wilson Center to discuss his experiences in the Philippines, describing the heavy toll overcrowding and poor resource management is taking on the country’s ecosystems and highlighting how access to family planning may hold the key to a better future.

You might think that conflict over water is inevitable as rising temperatures and changing climates are expected to constrain supplies in the coming decades at the same time that expanding consumption standards and growing populations are expected to boost demand. But you’d be wrong, according to the United Nations – and they’re launching the International Year for Water Cooperation this week to make that point.

“My income is just right to feed us three times a day,” Jason Bostero told Sam Eaton in the rural Philippine village of Humayhumay. “It’s really, really different when you have a small family.” Eaton traveled to the Philippines to report on the connections between food security and population for Homelands Productions, creating a short film and radio piece that ran on NewsHour and Marketplace as part the Food for Nine Billion series last year. [Video Below]

Stan Bernstein, a retired UNFPA senior policy adviser and former health adviser on the UN Millennium Project, recently attended the Seventh Annual Research Conference on Population, Reproductive Health, and Economic Development in Oslo, Norway. During the conference, Bernstein reflected on the presence of reproductive health and population issues among the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and their indicators. He also commented on prospects for including relevant reproductive health and population goals or indicators in the development agenda beyond 2015. Bernstein hailed the role of research from the PopPov network in the past and its potential contributions to future development agendas. He answers some questions for PRB below.

Ten years ago, a study was conducted in Mozambique to determine the impact of a new medicine for pregnant women with malaria. Over 1,000 women participated in a controlled trial of intermittent preventative treatment with sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine – half received a placebo, the other half received the actual drug. All were given an insecticide-treated net.