A central tenet of John Kerry’s time as Secretary of State has been an emphasis on climate change. In a speech in Indonesia this year, he compared the threat of changing climate conditions to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Though the United States has been slow to enact major climate legislation, the Department of State has developed a “road map” for responding in its own way. The REDD+ program could play a major role in this response, says Melanie Nakagawa of the department’s policy planning staff in this week’s podcast.

Ever since Thomas Malthus’ 18^th-century treatise linked overpopulation with conflict and poverty, population growth has been a subject of concern and controversy. But does population decline warrant similar attention? According to Steven Philip Kramer, the subject of this week’s podcast and author of The Other Population Crisis: What Governments Can Do About Falling Birth Rates, it does.

World population continues its steady climb, surpassing 7 billion in 2011 and heading to somewhere between 8 and 11 billion by midcentury. But funding to address population-related issues is moving in the opposite direction.

In sub-Saharan Africa, women collectively spend an estimated 40 billion hours a year gathering water, often walking miles to the nearest source, which may not be clean, and braving exhaustion, harassment, and worse along the way. Water availability and quality at health clinics is often not much better, creating a crisis for women, especially pregnant women, throughout the continent. A mutual solution lies in better coordination between efforts to improve water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) and maternal health, says the African Medical and Research Foundation’s Lisa Meadowcroft in this week’s podcast.

Resilience means different things to different people. For many in the international development and humanitarian communities, building resilience means responding to growing climate risks through disaster mitigation and planning. But for people like Birhani Fakadi, a 39-year old mother of 11 in rural Ethiopia, it also means access to reproductive health and family planning services, says ECSP’s Roger-Mark De Souza in this week’s podcast.