“We know that a number of these countries in Africa have the least to do with climate change in terms of emissions, but they are the most vulnerable, and they are the ones with the least capacity to deal with the effects of climate change,” says Clive Mutunga in this week’s podcast. Mutunga, a senior associate at Population Action International, discusses the results of a study PAI conducted looking at the entwined and related impacts of climate change and population growth, as well as other factors like water scarcity, on Kenya and Malawi.

“[Family planning] has great value for women’s health, for children’s health, but it also has great value for the environment, and it can also help…to promote economic development,” says Eliya Zulu in this week’s podcast. Zulu talks about the research he has conducted as executive director of the African Institute for Development Policy and emphasizes the need to pay attention to population and climate issues both at higher levels of development policy discussion and grassroots action. “We need to make sure we integrate at all levels,” he says.

There’s renewed interest in looking at future trends at USAID, said Steven Gale, a senior advisor at the agency. But “we’re always asking ourselves, ‘what is the development goal that [USAID] wants to achieve, and how is this megatrend going to increase or decrease the actual probability’” of that goal will be met?

In this week’s podcast, Gale describes the role of futures analysis at USAID, including the history of past efforts and similarities to other forward-looking projects, like the National Intelligence Council’s quadrennial Global Trends reports.

“The proliferation of disasters has gotten a lot of people talking about resilience, about how we can lessen our risk, and how we can recover more quickly from disasters of all kinds,” says Laurie Mazur in this week’s podcast.

Mazur describes the qualities of communities that can weather adversity, including social cohesion and the ability to make decisions for themselves. Above all, she reiterates that “humans are nothing if not resilient,” and the governance structures and disaster mitigation schemes we employ should capitalize on that native resilience, rather than infringe upon it.

“We believe that if you want to respond to critical development issues like climate change, that you need to address the social dimensions of resilience,” says Roger-Mark De Souza of Population Action International (PAI) in this week’s podcast.

“If you want to address climate change and you only look at mitigation, you are missing some of the important components,” he said. PAI, which advocates for better access to family planning in developing countries, starts from the standpoint that allowing couples to decide how many children they have leads to “investments in education and technology, providing opportunities for additional economic growth, enhanced development, and ultimately helping to build resilience and adaptive capacity.”.

In this podcast, Imelda Abano, who writes for Eco-Business in the Philippines, discusses her experiences reporting on population and environmental issues.

“It’s a very tough job for us to be reporting on these issues, but we have the responsibility to raise awareness…and we have to push for government action,” Abano says.

“The world of 2030 will be radically transformed from our world today,” reads the opening of Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, produced by the National Intelligence Council. In this podcast, principal author Mathew Burrows breaks down some of the scenarios discussed in the report, and describes how demographic and environmental trends – two of four “megatrends” – could play out over the next few decades.

In this podcast, Jack Goldstone of George Mason University discusses the world’s demographic stresses in the coming years. In parallel to a growing trend of population aging in developed countries, much of the world will remain young, growing, and urbanizing, he said. The choices these growing countries make over the next few decades will have reverberating effects for the rest of the world, from conflict potential to the spread of stable democracies.