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.

The water-energy-food nexus seems to be garnering more and more attention in the media and elsewhere, and it’s easy to see why: it’s a relatively simple way to illustrate how interconnected the world is today and the kind of domino-like effects that scarcity can have.

Eight years from now, the Gaza Strip will have “virtually no reliable access to sources of safe drinking water, standards of healthcare and education will have continued to decline, and the vision of affordable and reliable electricity for all will have become a distant memory for most,” according to a United Nations report released last month. The bleak assessment concludes that without immediate action to address immense and interconnected economic, demographic, environmental, infrastructure, and social challenges facing Gazans, “the already high number of poor, marginalized and food-insecure people depending on assistance will not have changed, and in all likelihood will have increased.”

This summer, 26 countries and private donors met at the London Summit on Family Planning to pledge $2.6 billion to expand family planning services to 120 million more women in the poorest countries around the world. But while the summit renewed focus on reproductive health with its ambitious target, “we’re now at that point where we have to really sit down and work through” how to achieve that goal, said Julia Bunting of the UK’s Department for International Development at the Wilson Center on September 17. [Video Below]

The original version of this article, by Kate Gilles and Marissa Pine Yeakey, appeared on the Population Reference Bureau’s Behind the Numbers blog.

World Contraception Day “centers around a vision for a world where every pregnancy is wanted,” with a goal of enabling “young people to make informed choices on their sexual and reproductive health.”

Following the steady economic growth that many African countries have experienced in recent years and continued population growth, urbanization has accelerated rapidly on the continent as people turn to cities to take advantage of new economic opportunities. But growing cities have led to another problem. According to a new Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report, Growing Greener Cities in Africa, urban populations are exceeding the capacity of African cities to provide food for them, putting nearly 300 million people at risk of hunger and malnutrition, and greener strategies – urban agriculture and better water use – could help considerably.

“Over the past several months, extreme weather and climate events seemed to have become the norm rather than the exception,” writes Kelly Levin for the World Resources Institute (WRI). Indeed, records have been broken around the world as countries experience unprecedented heat, drought, flooding, or other types of severe weather. And people are starting to take notice. A number of recent stories try to make sense of this wild weather and what, if anything, it has to do with climate change.

People are still talking about this summer’s London Summit on Family Planning, which was hosted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK’s Department of International Development (DIFD) on July 11. On Monday here at the Wilson Center, the Environmental Change and Security Program featured representatives from USAID, DFID, and Gates Foundation for a standing-room only panel discussion of the landmark event.