With UN demographers more certain than ever that global population will reach between 10 and 12 billion by the end of the century, the challenge of building a sustainable future seems daunting. But according to Wolfgang Lutz, founding director of the Vienna-based Wittgenstein Center for Demography and Global Human Capital, these projections miss one crucial variable: increasing levels of education. [Video Below]

One-third of boys in the developing world don’t face the risk of marriage and pregnancy before age 18. There are no laws preventing men from owning land or property. Men don’t bear the brunt of increasingly frequent and severe disasters. And men don’t hold fewer than 25 percent of parliamentary seats worldwide.

“Sub-Saharan Africa’s young people are in effect the global labor force of the future,” said Jack Goldstone at the Wilson Center on October 15. “Whether they are productive, how large that cohort turns out to be, whether they find work or not, is going to have a bearing, I think, on all of us.” [Video Below]

As is becoming clear, climate change, environmental degradation, population, and poverty alleviation are inextricably linked in many parts of the world. [Video Below]

At high noon, Devi KC is still deep in the daily chores she started at sunrise: brewing tea and cooking a meal of rice, lentils and spinach for her husband and teenage son; pumping and hauling water from the nearby well; harvesting hay from her field; and sweeping road dirt from her front porch.

The 69^th UN General Assembly was “an absolutely extraordinary opportunity” to rethink global development, said Genevieve Maricle, a senior policy advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to the UN Social and Economic Council (ECOSOC) who participated in the summit. [Video Below]