Not too hot, not too cold – Goldilocks had it right, says Laurie Mazur in a new series on the concept of resilience. Joining her in the top posts last month (measured by unique pageviews) was the World Resources Institute’s water risk atlas, an illustration of the effect of the demographic dividend using new Human Development Index data, and an update on Uganda’s population-development challenges by Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka. The Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum also continued their new Choke Point column with a discussion with activist Wang Canfa on China’s current environmental difficulties.

In “On Demographic and Democratic Transitions,” published in the February edition of Population and Development Review, author Tim Dyson postulates that the so-called “demographic transition” – a two-step process in which diminishing mortality rates are followed by decreases in total fertility – is an important predictor of a society’s transition from autocracy to democracy. Specifically, Dyson suggests that the population surge resulting from a decline in mortality may tend to destabilize pre-democratic regimes, while a subsequent drop in fertility rates may empower women and raise the median age of a population, thus paving the way for democracy to emerge. Dyson demonstrates a statistically significant correlation between population aging and inclination toward democracy, echoing the work of New Security Beat contributor, Richard Cincotta.

The original version of this article, by Stewart M. Patrick, appeared on the Council on Foreign Relations’ The Internationalist blog.

Not long ago, concerns about environmental degradation were marginal in U.S. national security deliberations. What a difference climate change has made. Foreign policy officials and experts are starting to recognize profound linkages between planetary health, economic prosperity, and international security. These connections were on full view last Wednesday, when the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) teamed up with Conservation International (CI) to convene a symposium, “Global Resources, the U.S. Economy, and National Security.”

Balbine is moving through her coastal village of Andavadoaka with a sense of urgency. Normally she works as a community-based distributor for Blue Ventures’ integrated population, health, and environment (PHE) program in southwest Madagascar, providing health information and products to her community. However, since Cyclone Haruna swept through the region several weeks ago, Balbine has been especially busy distributing diarrhea treatment kits to mothers caring for sick infants, providing families sleeping out in the open with mosquito nets to protect against malaria, setting up water filtering stations, and emphasizing the importance good hygiene practices.

“We need dynamic approaches. We can’t just keep going with the single sector approach and hoping that a conservation project will do really more than it’s intended to do,” said ECSP’s Multimedia Editor Sean Peoples in an interview with Dialogue at the Wilson Center. “These people are living integrated lives. How can we have integrated solutions for them?”

The original version of this article, by Carl Gierstorfer, appeared on the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

After spending almost two weeks in India’s northwestern state of Haryana, the destination for many trafficked brides, we decided to head to the source area. It lies two hours by plane to the east, in the lush green hills of Assam. Here, as well as in the surrounding states of West Bengal, Bihar, and Nagaland, many women are trafficked from the towns and villages to live the lives of slaves more than a thousand miles away from their homes.

We wanted to find out why.

Much ink has been spilled on the growing trend of global land grabs – land purchased en masse in developing countries like Ethiopia by foreigners mainly for agricultural export. But along with land, investors often also gain the right to use local water, and sometimes with little consideration for local livelihoods. Fred Pearce recently looked into these “water grabs” in a series for National Geographic.