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.

When I began my term as a public policy scholar at the Wilson Center last year working on the project “Science and the Media,” I ran into a journalist colleague I hadn’t seen in years. When he heard what I was doing, he said in astonishment, “Science? How did you get interested in that?”

“There is no magic bullet or solution to resolving climate change quickly,” said the Population Reference Bureau’s Jason Bremner at the Wilson Center on October 28. “Our next 100 years will be far different from the last 100 or the last 1000…and it has become clear that nations will have to pursue many strategies in order to reduce emissions, build resilience, and adapt.” [Video Below]

“We don’t know the reason for the death of fish in downstream villages,” Hamberton Nongtdu, a mine owner from the northeastern Indian state of Meghalaya, told me.

Climate change mitigation efforts are more broadly supported when they are framed as a public health issue, according to results recently published in Climatic Change. After polling U.S. participants with political identities ranging from very liberal to very conservative, authors Nada Petrovic, Jaime Madrigano, and Lisa Zaval found most participants, except those who identified as very conservative, believed “health” to be the most compelling reason to reduce fossil fuels.

On the heels of a landmark U.S.-China climate agreement, 2015 will be a critical year for China’s environmental and energy policy. A revised and much stricter Environmental Protection Law went into force on January 1; new amendments to the Air Pollution Law are likely to be put in place; and the National Development and Reform Commission will draft a new five-year plan.