From my hotel room, I'm watching an oil tanker push its way up the Mississippi River. Off in the distance, I see oil refineries, water storage tanks and fluffy white clouds building on the horizon. On the streets below, pedestrians move slowly through the heat and humidity, trying to stay in the shade and out of sight of the piercing hot sun.

I'm back in New Orleans, for the Society of Environmental Journalists' annual conference. It's been more than six years since I've been here but I haven't forgotten what a great city this is. It feels so different from any other American city I've been to; the architecture, the food, the history, even the city's layout - all of it makes it seem so much more foreign, more magical.

The theme (because we have to have a theme) is "Risk and Resilience" - something that this city knows a lot about, or has certainly learned a lot about in the nine years since Hurricane Katrina. And while New Orleans seems magical, it - like many other cities around the world - faces some very real problems when it comes to climate change.

This morning's workshop focused on what communities are at risk from climate change and what's being done to make those communities and populations more resilient. While there are all kinds of ways to approach this topic, many of the panelists honed in on population growth.

Obvious statement: population growth has a big effect on the environment.

No surprises there. It's especially a problem in poorer countries, where access to family planning, birth control and education are limited and poverty rates are high. But there have been some interesting finds out of attempts to curb population growth. In countries - Bangladesh was held up as an example - where WOMEN, not men, get more access to education, the population is less affected by climate change.

Why?

No one's entirely sure. But the theory is that when women get an education, they learn about family planning, they make better choices about their health, they understand the potential hazards in their community, they come up with disaster-preparedness plans, they develop skills that help get them out of poverty (or at least make them more economically stable and give them more power) - and all of those contribute to a population that is more resilient to climate change, that can adapt.

It's an interesting idea but it's really more about adaptation and long-term thinking. That's great. Climate change is going to affect everyone and populations will need to adapt to whatever it brings. But those changes are happening fast and we're a long ways from improving education for women across the globe.

So, as I sit looking out the window at New Orleans, a city for which climate change has some big implications, in a state that faces some very big problems, it leaves me with the question of what are we going to do right now? Can we curb population growth faster? What's being done in poorer countries to make them aware of climate change? And if we can't even get people in this country to believe the science, to change their habits, can we expect others to do the same? It seems to me the longer we wait to make serious changes now, the less resilient we will be in the long run.