“We know that a number of these countries in Africa have the least to do with climate change in terms of emissions, but they are the most vulnerable, and they are the ones with the least capacity to deal with the effects of climate change,” says Clive Mutunga in this week’s podcast. Mutunga, a senior associate at Population Action International, discusses the results of a study PAI conducted looking at the entwined and related impacts of climate change and population growth, as well as other factors like water scarcity, on Kenya and Malawi.

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.”.