As Saddam Hussein drained Iraq’s famed marshes to punish the rebellious tribesmen who lived in them, Amjad Mohamed packed his few possessions, grabbed his fishing rod, and fled south to Basra with his extended family.

Iran is poised to reap a vast “demographic dividend” if the appropriate national and international policies are adopted, including a nuclear deal with the P5+1 (five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany).

A new article from the Wilson Center’s own Roger-Mark De Souza explores how population trends can bolster community resilience in the face of climate change and other security threats. De Souza argues that demographic trends such as age structure help determine how well a population is able to respond to and bounce back from shocks, especially environmental ones like drought and famine.

At the launch of A New Climate for Peace, a new report on climate-fragility risks produced for the G7 by a consortium of international partners including the Wilson Center, USAID Deputy Assistant Administrator Christian Holmes called water a common denominator for climate risk.

Researchers have been warning about future water scarcity for decades, but new data reveals a majority of the world’s largest aquifers are already running out of water.

When the leaders of the G7 countries – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States – met earlier this month, they agreed to make fossil fuels a thing of the past by 2100. At the same time the G7 is also taking steps to make climate change’s connection to conflict a priority in the present.

With thousands of scientists representing 195 countries working for more than a quarter of a century, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the world’s leading authority on of assessing climate change and its potential socio-economic impacts. However, Marc Levy, an IPCC lead author and deputy director of Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network, says he’d have gone further in connecting climate change to conflict in their latest report if it were up to him.

Millions of people across the Middle East face drought, scarce drinking water supplies, and poor sanitation due to civil wars and conflict. Meanwhile, resource constraints and foreign military interventions risk more severe humanitarian disasters.