A new article from the Wilson Center’s own Roger-Mark De Souza explores how population trends can bolster community resilience in the face of climate change and other security threats. De Souza argues that demographic trends such as age structure help determine how well a population is able to respond to and bounce back from shocks, especially environmental ones like drought and famine.

In their first annual report, the ResilientAfrica Network (RAN), a partnership of 15 African universities, Tulane University, Stanford University, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, outlines efforts to explore and define multiple “pathways of vulnerability” in sub-Saharan Africa. The report acknowledges that these pathways can be very different from place to place, but by working with African communities more closely, they hope to find new ways to break cycles of chronic crisis. One of the interventions piloted by Stanford was “deliberative polling,” which is  based on the premise that communities are more likely to respond to development interventions if they understand the logic behind them and are involved in the process.

The discovery of oil in Chad in 1969 did not yield many immediate benefits for a population that would soon be wracked by civil war, but hopes were high by the late 1990s. Chad had largely stabilized, and a new, World Bank-backed project to build a pipeline through Cameroon to the Atlantic Ocean coast was touted as a model for socially and environmentally responsible oil exploitation in developing countries.

President Pierre Nkurunziza’s decision to run for a third term in April plunged Burundi into a state of unrest not seen since the end of the country’s civil war in 2005. Refugees are arriving in neighboring Tanzania, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in the tens of thousands, raising the possibility that the deteriorating security situation could spill over borders.

When the leaders of the G7 countries – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States – met earlier this month, they agreed to make fossil fuels a thing of the past by 2100. At the same time the G7 is also taking steps to make climate change’s connection to conflict a priority in the present.

A new report prepared by the UN Environment Program and UN peacekeeping operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (known as MONUSCO) found that just two percent of the total value of illicit natural resources smuggled from the country comes back to armed groups. Still, these funds, which amount to around $13 million a year, allow some 25 to 49 groups to continue operating in the country’s war-torn eastern provinces. Much more, as much as 50 percent, ends up in the hands of transnational criminal networks with the remaining profits flowing to individuals or companies elsewhere in the DRC or in Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi.

On a warm January afternoon, Tesema Merga, a village elder in Endibir, Ethiopia, surveyed the latest improvements to the long dirt road just outside his house. Eventually this road will be paved, which will bring significant changes to the community.

The world is more connected than ever before, but also more complex. Big, transnational trends like climate change, urbanization, and migration are changing the calculus of geopolitics, while local-level inequalities persist. “[Change] seems to be spinning around us so fast,” said John Hempelmann, president of the Henry M. Jackson Foundation, which honors the legacy of the late senator from Washington State. How can today’s and tomorrow’s leaders adjust to global trends? [Video Below]