This year’s World Water Day is taking on a broader theme than years past: sustainable development. The theme makes sense as two major international processes – the drafting of the Sustainable Development Goals to replace the Millennium Development Goals, and the most anticipated UN Climate Summit in years – are taking place in 2015. Decisions made over the next nine months will play a huge role in relationships between nations and global development priorities going forward.

As the international development community looks back on the Millennium Development Goals and ponders what remains to be done under the proposed Sustainable Development Goals, the maternal health field has some reflecting to do, said Dr. Ana Langer, professor and director of Harvard’s Maternal Health Task Force at the Wilson Center on December 1. [Video Below]

With the Obama Administration moving forward on emissions reductions, the deadline for drafting the Sustainable Development Agenda, and a highly anticipated global climate summit in Paris, 2015 promises to be a crucial year for climate policy. “In many ways, last year was the year of building momentum, and this is the year of getting the work done,” said Lisa Friedman, deputy editor of ClimateWire, at the Wilson Center on January 5. [Video Below]

Population projections undergird many important policy decisions, from the U.S. government’s Feed the Future program to the Sustainable Development Goals. But they’re not as straightforward as they appear. Demographers often base their estimates on complicated assumptions that aren’t obvious to the end user.

“A world in which a quarter of humanity is denied full enjoyment of their rights is an unjust world,” said Kate Gilmore, deputy executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). “It’s a world without the building blocks for human progress, for human peace, for human security.” [Video Below]

“We cannot ignore the new reality that climate change has become a major foreign policy issue in the 21^st century,” a new film by Hal and Marilyn Weiner concludes.

This fall, a series of significant events signaled what many see as a shift toward meaningful collective action on climate change.