“We’ve got real pressure on key natural resources: food, water, energy, and land,” says Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti, the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s special representative on climate change, in this week’s podcast. “But what we haven’t got, if I can use the words of Winston Churchill, we haven’t got ‘action this day.’”

“Morisetti spoke at the Wilson Center on June 6 for the launch of The Climate and Energy Nexus: Challenges and Opportunities for Transatlantic Security, by CNA and the Royal United Services Institute. As climate change threatens stability in some places, energy security has emerged as a key vulnerability to Western militaries’ abilities to respond to conflict and assist in disaster relief operations, says Morisetti.

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.