“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.”

“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.

The original version of this article, by Michael D. Lemonick, appeared on Climate Central.

Water resources, energy, and land use are so mutually dependent that climate-related disruptions to any one of them could lead to economically devastating ripple effects – especially as a growing population puts increasing strains on all three. That’s one conclusion of a recent report issued by a federal advisory committee charged with assessing how climate change has already affected the U.S., and what the future holds.

“I’d like to start by stating emphatically that since addressing global inequality and inequity are our overall principles in revising the MDGs [Millennium Development Goals], we must focus on health inequities to have a meaningful and lasting impact on human development,” said Beth Schlachter of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, speaking at the Wilson Center on January 9. “And for the most vulnerable – women and girls – that means we must focus on sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights.” [Video Below]

In a new book from the Wilson Center, Caryle Murphy asks how, while its neighbors face revolutions, Saudi Arabia has been able to “weather the storm of Arab youth discontent seemingly unscathed.”

To find out, Murphy went to the source, interviewing 83 young Saudis between the ages of 19 and 29 in the spring of 2012. She found that “they are by no means a revolutionary lot, preferring gradual, step-by-step change. They want change, but not at the cost of safety and security. Most favor more tolerance for diversity, including in the realm of religion.”