While Pakistan’s demographic challenges are perhaps well known – two-thirds of the population of 180 million is under 30 years old – increasing security concerns have prompted discussions about exactly how much the country’s youthfulness is affecting its prospects for peace. On October 10, the U.S. Institute of Peace and George Mason University’s School of Public Policy hosted a day-long conference on “Youth Bulge, Public Policy, and Peace in Pakistan” to tackle this question.

Quantifying the role population plays in food security is “an incredibly powerful piece of information,” said Kathleen Mogelgaard in an interview with ECSP. Malawi is a case in point.

Mogelgaard saw the connections between food, population, and climate change firsthand on a recent trip to the southeast African country, whose population of 15 million is largely dependent on subsistence, rain-fed agriculture. “One in five children in Malawi is currently undernourished,” Mogelgaard said, and climate change paints a bleak picture for the future.

Tanzania’s Saadani National Park is a hotbed of biodiversity and, like other national parks in the region, it’s surrounded by human activity. A report by the BALANCED Project, “Population, Health, Environment Situational Analysis for the Saadani National Park Area, Tanzania,” provides a snapshot of the population, health, and environment situation inside the park to serve as a baseline for future activities of the Tanzania Coastal Management Partnership (TCMP) – a joint initiative of the government of Tanzania, USAID, and the University of Rhode Island’s Coastal Resources Center. A behavioral monitoring system implemented in June 2009 used surveys that reached a total of 437 respondents (54 percent women) from eight villages to analyze the “behaviors that positively and negatively influence the utilization and condition of natural resources.”  The surveys found that arable land is scarce, fisheries are being depleted, and people have inadequate access to healthcare, water, sanitation, fuel, and family planning resources. The results suggest a strong case for expanding TCMP’s existing integrated approach – combining HIV/AIDS, conservation, and livelihoods goals – to include promotion of positive behavior changes, particularly as they relate to family planning and the effects of population growth on biodiversity loss and resource depletion.

The original version of this article, by Michael Kugelman, appeared on Global Times.

In recent weeks, militants in Pakistan have escalated their hostile rhetoric toward India. The subject of their ire is water. Hafiz Saeed, the head of militant Islamist group Jamaat-ud-Dawa, has warned that India plans “to make Pakistan barren” by preventing the waters of the Indus Basin from flowing downstream to Pakistan. 

In 2011, a record 34 billion cubic tons of carbon dioxide were emitted from man-made sources. Half the emitted CO₂ stays in the atmosphere, about a quarter is absorbed on land (as trees grow, for example), and the remainder is absorbed by the ocean. Unsurprisingly, this incredible amount of carbon dioxide significantly changes the ocean environment. Over time, increased absorption of carbon dioxide in the oceans has led to ocean acidification, and overall warming has also led to warming of ocean waters – both changes impact marine ecosystems and the people who rely on them.

Two weeks ago, 1,600 venture capitalists, philanthropists, and entrepreneurs gathered at the 2012 Social Capital Markets Conference (SOCAP) to discuss the question at the heart of impact investing: How can investments do well while also doing good? Consistent with the in-depth nature of SOCAP, panels examined every aspect of capital flows, including how to structure a business, how to move an idea from a prototype to scale, and where to invest for maximum impact. The resulting conversations gave rise to multiple technical suggestions – and one paradigm shift. In order to do well and do good, multiple conference participants argued, investors must incorporate a gender lens into their portfolio.

Today is the first “International Day of the Girl Child” – a day established last year by the United Nations to acknowledge the rights and unique challenges faced by young girls around the world.

The latest UN projections put the number of women under the age of 19 at about 1.18 billion today. Especially in developing countries (though not only) these young girls often face outsized barriers to happy, healthy, and productive lives.

This is part of a seven-part “environmental challenges and opportunities” series featured in the University of Minnesota’s fall issue of Momentum magazine.

As world population careens toward nine billion, all the planet’s systems will be strained. Lowering fertility rates is a complex endeavor, and no one path leads directly there. Poverty, access to contraception, education, job prospects, cultural mores – all of these influence family size. So addressing any of them, or a combination, can help. Solutions abound, at least on a relatively small scale, such as conservation programs that include family planning components.