“Right now, 1.5 billion people are living in humanitarian crisis – living in conflict-afflicted regions,” says Kate Gilmore, deputy executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), in this week’s podcast.

“The demographic data is telling us that the future is very young and the future is very female,” says Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda, a lawyer and general secretary of the World Young Women’s Christian Association (World YWCA), in this week’s podcast. “And therefore, we actually have an imperative to respond.”

“We [need to] stop treating ‘adaptation’ like a sector,” says John Furlow, climate change specialist at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), in this week’s podcast, “but start treating it as a stress or a risk that undermines the development sectors, the environmental sectors, the social sectors that we care about.”

“The relationship between human health…and environmental changes is extremely complex,” says Sally Edwards, advisor for sustainable development and environmental health of the Pan-American Health Organization/World Health Organization office for the eastern Caribbean countries, in this week’s podcast.

Rich in natural resources, poor in nearly every human development indicator. The description applies to many of the most-conflict ridden states in the world, but also to a region often forgotten in global development circles: the Arctic North.

For the past four decades, urbanization in Latin American and Caribbean countries has been on the rise. Today it’s one of the most urbanized regions of the world with 79 percent of the population living in towns and cities. By 2050, 9 out of 10 residents are expected to live in cities. This density and movement of people is critical to understanding the region’s water and climate change issues, says ECSP’s Roger Mark De Souza in this week’s podcast.

In May 1855, Dr. James Marion Sims opened the first obstetric fistula hospital in New York City. Just 40 years later, it closed, reflecting a sharp decline in maternal morbidity rates in the United States and other Western countries. The Waldorf Astoria Hotel now stands on the site of the former hospital. “We know that we have eradicated obstetric fistula in high income countries; it happened at the turn of the 20th century,” says Dr. Lauri Romanzi, project director of Fistula Care Plus, in this week’s podcast.

“Perhaps I’m a case study for what happens in the federal government when we start on a tough problem,” says Alice Hill, the senior director for resilience policy at the National Security Council and former senior counselor to the secretary of homeland security, in this week’s podcast.