Rajasthan state, India — Mamta holds her daughter in the room she and her husband share with her extended family. Although Indian law restricts women younger than 18 from marrying, the tradition is so strong and enforcement is so lax that nearly half do so anyway, all but guaranteeing an early start to childbearing.

PHOTOGRAPH BY: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

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Cairo, Egypt — Members of the Egyptian army pray with protesters in Tahrir Square on Feb. 11, 2011, the day that President Hosni Mubarak bowed to popular pressure and agreed to step down. The protests were driven by numerous factors, including high unemployment, increasing poverty levels a large population of dissatisfied youth.

PHOTOGRAPH BY: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

http://framework.latimes.com/?attachment_id=65330

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Shanghai — High-rises sprawl in all directions in Shanghai, a city of 23 million that is under constant construction. Barring windy days like this one, the buildings often disappear in a haze of brown smog.

PHOTOGRAPH BY: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

http://framework.latimes.com/?attachment_id=65336

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Manila, Philippines — Barefoot children play in the sludge of the Tondo dump, where residents eke out a living by sifting through the refuse.

PHOTOGRAPH BY: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

http://framework.latimes.com/?attachment_id=65345

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Manila, Philippines — Yolanda Naz prepares a meal in the family's two-story shack. The bottom floor functions as kitchen and bathroom and is often infested by rats. The Philippines, an archipelago of 96 million people, has one of the fastest-growing populations in Asia.

PHOTOGRAPH BY: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

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Mumbai, India — A young girl is led through mounds of trash in an area that many call home in Mumbai.

PHOTOGRAPH BY: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

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Manila, Philippines — Even in the quiet season, women must share beds in the postnatal recovery room at Jose Fabella hospital.

PHOTOGRAPH BY: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

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Manila, Philippines — The sun lights up the towers of Quiapo Church in Manila. Following Vatican dictates, Philippine bishops oppose the pill, condoms, intrauterine devices and any other "artificial" measure to prevent pregnancy. Instead, they sanction only natural methods, such as abstinence during a woman's fertile time of the month.

PHOTOGRAPH BY: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

http://framework.latimes.com/?attachment_id=65343

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Punjab, India — Barring a breakthrough of some kind, India will again have to rely on handouts or imported grain to feed its multitudes.

PHOTOGRAPH BY: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

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Punjab state, India — Surjit Singh embraced the so-called Green Revolution in his youth, signing on to a new way of farming that introduced fertilizer, pesticides, hybrid seeds and groundwater pumped out with modern equipment. But such high-intensity agriculture has taken a toll: shrinking water tables, exhausted or salt-contaminated soils, resistant pests and plumes of fertilizer and pesticides in streams and aquifers.

PHOTOGRAPH BY: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

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Lucknow, India — Preschoolers sit with empty bowls as they wait for a porridge of lentils and rice provided by CARE. "We are doing the best we can," said Anup Murari Rajan, an officer with CARE India, which provides free meals at 32,000 community centers in Uttar Pradesh state. "These slums are increasing day by day."

PHOTOGRAPH BY: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

http://framework.latimes.com/?attachment_id=65325

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Dadaab, Kenya — New arrivals wait to be admitted into Dadaab, the world's largest refugee camp complex. The Somalis who reach it have fled war and hunger in their homeland -- only to discover an equally drought-plagued Kenya.

PHOTOGRAPH BY: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

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Dadaab, Kenya — A family's makeshift home at the Dadaab complex. Though the world produces enough food to sustain its 7 billion residents, hunger persists in developing countries because people can't afford to buy food or can't grow enough on their own. By midcentury, global production could be insufficient to feed everyone even in theory.

PHOTOGRAPH BY: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

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Dadaab, Kenya — A mug of spilled porridge seeps into the dry ground.

PHOTOGRAPH BY: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

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Dadaab, Kenya — Two-year-old Saad Siyat, near death, gasps at the hospital at Dadaab's Ifo camp. When he arrived, he was suffering from pneumonia and chronic undernourishment -- in particular, a protein deficiency known as kwashiorkor. The name derives from a West African term for "rejected one," a child pushed from his mother's breast to make way for a newborn.

PHOTOGRAPH BY: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

http://framework.latimes.com/?attachment_id=65334

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Mumbai, India — A commuter train speeds past the Dharavi slum in Mumbai. Most of the world's population growth in the next several decades will occur in places least able to handle it.

PHOTOGRAPH BY: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

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Samburu, Kenya — Women line up at a mobile clinic in Samburu, Kenya, where the services include birth control and family planning education.

PHOTOGRAPH BY: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

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Pul-e-Charkhi, Afghanistan — Abdul Wahid, one of 10 children of an Afghan electrician, had little education and few job prospects by the time he turned 18. Instead, he joined the Taliban, where he says he found not only income but respect. "My life got better," said Wahid, who wound up in Pul-e-Charkhi Prison outside Kabul after he was caught helping wire a car bomb.

PHOTOGRAPH BY: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

http://framework.latimes.com/?attachment_id=65327

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Kabul, Afghanistan — Obaida Rahmati makes the trip to school from the Kabul shelter where she lives. When she was 9, her heroin-addicted father sold her to a neighbor, who planned to marry her as soon as she turned 12, a fate she narrowly escaped after her older sister helped rescue her. Although access to education for girls has improved since U.S.-led forces toppled the Taliban regime in 2001, fewer than half of them attend school. Women and girls have little control over their fates in Afghanistan, a country deemed the most dangerous place to be a woman, according to a Thomson Reuters Foundation survey of health experts. The reasons: gender-targeted violence, brutal poverty and abysmal healthcare.

PHOTOGRAPH BY: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

http://framework.latimes.com/?attachment_id=65328

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Lingshi, China — Guo Tie Sheng fertilizes a field next to a coal-fired plant in Lingshi, Shanxi province, in the heart of China's coal belt. The country's growing use of coal is worrisome to climate scientists, who say that to avoid a potentially catastrophic rise in global temperatures, worldwide carbon dioxide emissions must be cut in half by 2050. China argues that it shouldn't be penalized given that the world's industrialized nations polluted their way to prosperity.

PHOTOGRAPH BY: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

http://framework.latimes.com/?attachment_id=65338

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Taiyuan, China — Workers tear out a street in Taiyuan to make way for something new. The nation is busily expanding its urban areas to accommodate the masses of people migrating from the countryside in search of a better life.

PHOTOGRAPH BY: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

http://framework.latimes.com/?attachment_id=65339

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Beijing, China — A bicyclist rides past posters of trees in Beijing. The government has planted actual trees around the periphery of the city in an effort to control the dust that blows in from cleared land in outlying areas.

PHOTOGRAPH BY: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

http://framework.latimes.com/?attachment_id=65340

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Linfen, China — Wang Xixhan tends a small garden at his home in the shadow of a steel mill in Linfen. The ancient city, once known for its fruits and flowers, in recent years earned the World Bank's dubious distinction of most polluted city on Earth. After that rebuke, Chinese officials cracked down on some of the illegal coal mines in Linfen as well as its dirtiest coal-fired furnaces. Residents say things have improved: Vegetables will grow now and people's headaches and nausea have diminished.

PHOTOGRAPH BY: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

http://framework.latimes.com/?attachment_id=65337

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Manama, Bahrain — Protesters demonstrate in Manama, Bahrain, one of the places affected by the "Arab Spring" unrest last year. About 80% of the world's civil conflicts since the 1970s have occurred in countries with young, fast-growing populations, known as "youth bulges," according to an analysis by the nonprofit Population Action International.

PHOTOGRAPH BY: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

http://framework.latimes.com/?attachment_id=65329

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