The fourth global Women Deliver conference in May brought nearly 6,000 experts and advocates to Copenhagen to address the health and rights of women and girls, including a small group of young midwives who attended a symposium beforehand. “I went in a little bit skeptical,” says Alix Bacon, president of the Midwives Association of British Columbia and one of 32 women under 35 who received a scholarship to attend, in this week’s podcast. “And I came home a changed woman and a believer.”

More and more we are hearing stories about “climate refugees.”  U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell used the term to describe the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe, a community which this year became the first to receive federal funding to relocate in its entirety from their sinking island home on the Louisiana coast.

Nearly six months after the Paris climate agreement, the international community’s attention has shifted from celebration to implementation. Governments have begun outlining climate pledges in the form of intended nationally determined contributions, or INDCs – which are fast becoming nationally determined contributions, or NDCs, as they begin influencing policy.

In the months leading up to the United Nations conference on climate change in Paris last fall, expectations were high. And the result actually exceeded those expectations in many respects, says Nick Mabey, director and chief executive at the environment consultancy E3G, in this week’s podcast.

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.

Climate change has the potential to exacerbate conflict and political instability, and women will pay a steeper price than their male counterparts when it does, says Mayesha Alam, associate director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security, in this week’s podcast.

“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.