Water engineer Gordon Mumbo of USAID’s Sustainable Water Partnership grew up in the small Kenyan village of Kamuga. Year after year, he watched as frequent floods from one of Kenya’s major rivers, the Nyando, disrupted village life. After 30 years of a wide-ranging career in water, for the first time since his childhood, he has returned to his birthplace, where he leads a team building community engagement in the Mara River basin.

It’s 2018, so why are women still dying in childbirth? This episode of Everybody Counts, hosted by Jennifer D. Sciubba, a professor of political demography at Rhodes College, explores why maternal mortality is a global issue, what policy solutions can keep mothers healthy, and why valuing women is at the heart of the issue.

From mass urbanization to massive refugee flows, high fertility to record low birth rates, global population is changing in unprecedented ways.  “Everybody Counts,” a new podcast series hosted by Rhodes College Professor and Wilson Center Global Fellow Jennifer D. Sciubba, launches a lively and thoughtful conversation about the ways human population shapes our world and how we live today.

As the Atlantic hurricane season kicks off this month, some coastal communities in the United States and small-island nations in the Caribbean are still recovering from last year’s record-breaking damage. At the same time, the heavy rains pounding the East Coast this week are part of a long-term trend towards more severe heavy rainfall events that have led to deadly floods and threaten critical U.S. military bases. Even on sunny days, cities such as Norfolk and Manila contend with high tide or “nuisance” flooding—a phenomenon that has increased as much as nine-fold since the 1960s, according to NOAA.

Conservationists and development practitioners may not have always seen eye to eye, but a new partnership between a cheetah conservation charity and a network of reproductive health NGOs is making the case for why these groups need to work more closely together.

One of the most recent and promising tools to cope with the consequences of the rising number of disasters is climate risk insurance. In exchange for an annual premium, they quickly provide states and other actors (including individuals) with much-needed cash to cope with the impacts of natural hazards such as hurricanes, droughts, and floods.  Within certain parameters, policyholders are largely free to determine how they want to use the payouts. The African Risk Capacity (ARC), the Caribbean Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF), and the Pacific Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (PCRAFI Facility) serve as cases in point. To date, they have made 44 payouts to 19 countries totaling about US$ 173 million. Simply put: they work.

“Alaska is a place in which climate change is already impacting us in very observable ways,” says Byron Mallott, the  Lieutenant Governor of Alaska, in a video interview with Wilson Center NOW.  “We have erosion from sea ice leaving the coast. We have patterns of weather change. We have, in the North Pacific Ocean, ocean water change [and] temperature changes taking place. We have ocean acidification moving further north. We have had impact on fisheries already—economic impact.”