In my tiny, half-an-island country of Timor-Leste, cemeteries smell of jasmine and come to life on All Saints’ Day. Families have picnics and kids roam wild over the tombstones. Here, stepping on somebody else’s family tombstones is not seen as an offense but as the norm; after all, since there isn’t enough land to hold so many graves, not stepping on one is impossible unless you have mastered levitation.

“With current neglect of family planning, the UN’s recent projection of a 2100 world population of up to 12.3 billion is a possibility,” says a report from the University of California, San Francisco’s Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health. Increased voluntary family planning efforts are needed, the authors contend, to meet existing demand for contraceptives, stabilize the threat of global food insecurity, and reduce carbon emissions that contribute to climate change.

As momentum builds towards the negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals and UN climate change summit later this year, the G7 countries – France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Canada, the UK, and the United States – have made a strong statement about the importance of climate security risks. A New Climate for Peace: Taking Action on Climate and Fragility Risks, an independent report commissioned by G7 foreign ministers and authored by a consortium of international organizations including the Wilson Center, analyzes the security and stability risks posed by climate change and offers concrete policy options for addressing them. [Video Below]

Karachi, the world’s second largest city by population, is emerging from the grips of a deadly heatwave. A persistent low pressure system camped over the Arabian Sea stifled ocean breezes and brought temperatures in excess of 113°F (45°C) to the city of 23 million people in June. The searing heat disrupted electricity and water service, making life nearly unbearable. All told, officials estimate the heatwave killed at least 1,200 Pakistanis, more than twice as many as have died in terrorist attacks this year.

In 2011 Thailand was hit by unprecedented monsoon rains far above the average rainfall of the previous 30 years. Two million people across 26 provinces were affected. During the crisis, hundreds of civilians took it to the streets to protest discrimination by the Flood Response Operation Center and the unfair distribution of water, electricity supply, shelter, and food. Civilians were so angry that they broke a sandbag wall in Bangkok which was protecting a wealthy district from water surges. Public unrest and discontent with the government continued until a military coup in 2013.

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.