“[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, 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.

In this podcast, journalist Sam Eaton describes the process of producing two pieces that aired on Marketplace and NewsHour last year on the connection between population, the environment, and food security in the Philippines. Eaton visited the rural village of Humayhumay where PATH Foundation Philippines, Inc., has a pilot program distributing contraceptives and teaching community members about conservation and sustainable livelihoods. Although Eaton said he was at first hesitant to tackle such an “abstract concept” as integrated population, health, and environment development, he found on the ground that it had “all the elements of a good story” and there were tangible benefits visible within the community. Eaton discussed his reporting at the Wilson Center on January 28.

“Building resilience should help address the root causes of vulnerability, creating increased capacity to be able to adapt to a range of possible climate futures, not just cope with… specific climate impacts,” says International Alert’s Janani Vivekananda. Otherwise, if the specific impacts don’t play out, “in a fragile context that could be quite destabilizing and seen as a wasted opportunity.”

Bloomberg BNA‘s Director of Environmental News John Sullivan gives an overview of the key legislative, regulatory, and legal developments expected in 2013, including the Keystone XL pipeline, the future for coal-fired power plants, and the potential actions that may be taken by Congress, the White House, and the Environmental Protection Agency.