“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?

In may not be surprising that China, home to so many other superlatives, also faces desertification on a grand scale. According to China’s State Forestry Administration, over 27 percent of the country now suffers from desertification – more than 1,000,000 square miles, or about one-third of the continental United States – impacting the lives of more than 400 million people.

Resilience is a wonderful metaphor. It somehow conveys in a single word the qualities of bending without breaking, of healing after an injury, of tensile rather than brittle strength. Oak and palm trees are resilient to the power of strong winds, before which they bend and then straighten again. Resilient people pick themselves up after being knocked down, draw on their reserves of ideas and strength to deal with difficult challenges, or hunker down until the gale has blown itself away. Resilient economies bounce back, and resilient ecosystems restore themselves after the fire or the flood has passed.

Water is the foundation of human society and will become even more critical as population growth, development, and climate change put pressure on already-shrinking water resources in the years ahead. But will this scarcity fuel conflict between countries with shared waters, as some have predicted, or will it create more impetus for cooperation?

Yunnan province is a microcosm of the intertwined natural resource challenges facing China. Dams, development, deforestation, drought, and climate change threaten China’s most biodiverse province – all while it increases its exports of agricultural products and electricity to China’s coastal provinces. These competing demands bring into question the sustainability of China’s development paradigm and the country’s environmental security.

Cooperation, not conflict; that’s the theme of this year’s World Water Day. Collaboration over water has been the rule rather than the exception over the past 70 years, UNESCO explained in the launch of their International Year for Water Cooperation initiative earlier this year (which the rest of the UN is thoughtfully supporting).

But the fact that there’s need for such an initiative shows that water conflict and other water issues are not far from the minds of global policymakers. Scarcity, drought, climate change, food security, disease – water impacts people and their governments in so many ways. Here’s a rundown of some of our best related posts.

A well-known Chinese proverb describing the relationship between the central government in Beijing and its people says, “Heaven is high and the emperor is far away” (天高皇帝远, tian gao, huang di yuan). It’s not too far of a stretch to apply the same proverb to the current state of China’s environment sector, where relatively strong pollution control laws are poorly enforced on the ground.

The original version of this article, by Jason Beaubien, appeared on NPR’s health blog, Shots.

“The meek shall inherit the earth” – that seems to be the latest message from the United Nations Development Program.