“The development agenda is discretionary and the human rights agenda is obligatory,” said Kitty van der Heijden, the ambassador for sustainable development in the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on the final day of the ICPD International Conference on Human Rights here in the Netherlands.

“Unless something changes in a major way, Nigeria will pass the United States as the third most populous country by mid-century and rival China with its number of people by the end of the century,” said Ken Weiss in his introduction to a recent webinar hosted by Resource Media. But what does population growth have to do with the environment?

How can NGOs and civil society promote environmental protection and improve people’s health and livelihoods in remote tropical forests? Two NGOs with innovative programs in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea spoke at the Wilson Center on May 30 about their efforts to simultaneously tackle these issues and highlight their intricate relationship. 

“Today we have a golden opportunity to use respectful maternal care to break new ground at the intersection of health and human rights,” said Lynn Freedman, director of the Averting Maternal Death and Disability Program and professor of clinical population and family health at Columbia University, at the Wilson Center.

October 31, 2011, was notable not only for the annual ritual of candy and costumes, but also for its designation by the United Nations as the date when global population reached seven billion. Although just an estimate – demographers are not able to count individuals in real time on such a large scale – the event was an important opportunity to present population trends to the media and public dialogue. Several babies born that day were named the “seven billionth;” in Russia, where various incentives have been implemented to try to boost an ultra-low fertility rate, Vladimir Putin visited a maternity ward to greet one of them.

“Most of the world’s poor are farmers; they share the same profession and the same challenges,” said One Acre Fund’s Stephanie Hanson at a recent Wilson Center event on small-scale farming, climate change, food security, and migration. They are tasked with growing enough food to support their families with only tenuous access to land and natural resources, the most basic of tools, and increasingly unpredictable weather patterns to deal with. [Video Below]

A woman sat crouched on the side of a busy road in Dakar, a baby in a sling on her back and a basket of peanuts in front. I know only a little French, and no Wolof, but I decided to try anyway. “Bonsoir,” I said, and smiled at the toddler beside her. “Combien?” I asked, pointing at the peanuts.

She smiled back at me, we negotiated a sale, and in exchange for the coins in my pocket I walked away with a few bags of the small, tasty nuts that are grown throughout the “peanut basin” of central Senegal.

The original version of this article, by Carl Haub, appeared on Demographics Revealed.

Few terms in demography can cause more confusion than “urbanization.” News stories reporting projections of world urbanization are nearly always accompanied by photographs of places such as London or Shanghai, and it does seem rather natural to think of urbanization in those terms.