Women in Madagascar are scrambling to access contraception—while they still can. By the end of this year, one of the most prominent organizations that provides family planning services in the country will have shut down 21 of its 22 mobile contraception clinics, an important service in a country where transportation and roads are in poor shape.

To meet the climate challenge, city leaders are committing to ambitious emissions targets, designing decentralized action plans, and sharing lessons in transnational networks. Since growing cities are a large source of global emissions, their efforts could contribute substantially to global climate objectives. As the world’s climate experts gather next week in Bonn, Germany, for the 23rd Conference of the Parties (COP-23), urban initiatives will be a key focal point of the agenda-setting conversation.

Earlier this month, more than 40 people perished and 20,000 people were ordered to evacuate as Northern California faced some of its deadliest fires in decades. Potentially fueled by climate change, these fires—only the only the latest in a string of fires to strike the state—will reshape landscapes and lives, as I know well from personal experience on the other side of the world.

Water is a “strategic instrument in the creation of a safer, healthier, more nutritious, less aggressive world,” said Winrock International President and CEO Rodney Ferguson at the first event in a four-part series on water security organized by the Wilson Center and the Sustainable Water Partnership. Panelists at the event identified innovative and integrated efforts necessary to increase global water security in the face of growing water scarcity.

Over the past 25 years, economic and political demographers have documented how declines in fertility rates have preceded improvements in state capacity, income, and political stability in much of East Asia, Latin America, and, most recently, in the Maghreb region of North Africa (Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria). Nonetheless, social scientists still debate over where and when this “demographic dividend” will occur in the youthful, low-income countries of sub-Saharan Africa.  Elizabeth Leahy Madsen of the Population Reference Bureau and I find that, for most youthful countries—like those in sub-Saharan Africa—changes in population age structure provide a means to gauge the timing of their future development.

“Resilience means the ability to cope and move ahead,” said Joan Dalton, the gender lead at THINK Liberia during the second session in a series of conversations on resilience and health at the Wilson Center. As conflicts, epidemics, and natural disasters increasingly leave global health systems vulnerable to devastation, it is important to build resilient health systems through interventions that support community resilience, agreed global health experts at the panel event co-hosted by CARE and the Maternal Health Initiative.

Six years of brutal warfare have destroyed basic infrastructure in Yemen, Libya, and Syria.  While U.S. and European governments have been largely preoccupied with providing immediate assistance and dealing with refugees, international humanitarian organizations—such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and Doctors without Borders—are focusing on how to repair, maintain, and safeguard the facilities that provide essential services like clean water, sanitation, and electricity.  Yet these efforts are hindered by lack of resources, protracted violence, and—most insidiously—by the warring parties’ intentional targeting of humanitarian actors and environmental infrastructure. Just as the extensive damage from hurricanes in the Caribbean and southeastern United States has underscored the need for more resilient infrastructure, the wars of the Middle East show that protecting infrastructure is key to protecting civilians caught up in conflict.