The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fifth assessment, which has been rolling out in stages since last September, confirms a crucial divide in current climate thinking: efforts to adapt and mitigate to climate change are often considered separately from the vulnerability of people.

You might wonder what the Cold War has to do with climate change, but as I listened last month to historian James Graham Wilson talk about the “triumph of improvisation” that ended the nearly 50-year stare-down between the United States and the U.S.S.R., I was struck by the parallels. The idea of individual leaders escaping the momentum of conventional approaches and adapting on the fly to solve a major global issue deeply resonated with me. It’s exactly what international climate change negotiations desperately need.

Evaluation is the lifeblood of any development effort – it’s how implementers know if they’re making a difference, determine what to do more or less of, and enables funders to evaluate cost-effectiveness. But it’s also an inexact science, no more so than when it comes to complex interventions that cut across sectors. [Video Below]

Half the world’s pigs – 476 million – reside in China. Increasingly prosperous consumers are eating fewer grains and demanding a more protein-rich diet, ballooning the pork industry to 15 times its 1960s-era size. In the last 30 years, Chinese demand for meat has quadrupled and China is now the largest consumer of seafood in the world.

In a world faced with rising temperatures, increasingly severe droughts and floods, and a rapidly growing population, how can people adapt to this new way of life – and even thrive? Leading experts discussed this question in-depth during an Aspen Institute Global Health and Development Program event titled, “Building Resiliency: The Importance of Food Security and Population.” The panel took place as part of the Civil Society Policy Forum at the 2014 IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings in Washington, DC.

Outside of donor and humanitarian aid, South Sudan’s economy is almost entirely dependent on the oil sector – and that sector is in crisis.