As the dust settles on the newly minted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Paris climate agreement, countries have begun tackling operational questions aimed at limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius and ensuring peaceful, sustainable development.

“It’s not about counting how many times a mother interacts with antenatal services or comes to the facility,” says Dr. Mariam Claeson, the director of maternal newborn and child health at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in this week’s podcast. “But it’s what happens in these encounters that matters.”

“Zika has made a long-standing public health crisis impossible to ignore,” says Chloë Cooney, director of global advocacy at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, in this week’s podcast.

Since its inception more than 60 years ago, USAID’s Office of Food for Peace has provided critical food assistance to billions of people around the world. Yet, despite its name, the office lacked a strategy to address the effects of conflict on its work.

Climate change is impacting the U.S. military in two major ways, explains Sharon Burke in this week’s podcast.

When it comes to environmental change, “policies and laws can have a very productive contribution toward positive adaptation, or they can subvert that and constrain options,” says Jon Unruh, associate professor of human geography and international development at McGill University, in this week’s podcast.

“It has always surprised me actually how powerful this ‘demographic dividend’ framework seems to be,” says Ellen Starbird, director of USAID’s Office of Population and Reproductive Health, in this week’s podcast. But “for a lot of countries it’s a long way off.”

“In my view, we are 40 years into a 100-year transition to a clean energy economy,” says Mike Eckhart, global head of environmental finance and sustainability at Citigroup, in this week’s podcast. “We’re in the mainstream of building an industry.”