The Australian government’s recent Foreign Policy White Paper has been criticized for its underwhelming climate change section. Penny Wong, the current opposition leader in the Australian Senate, said that its acknowledgement of the need to support a more resilient Pacific region “rings hollow in light of the Abbott/Turnbull Government’s massive aid cuts.” But despite these criticisms, the Australian government continues to support a range of climate change initiatives in the Pacific. Increasingly, Australian Aid and its fellow donors, including USAID, JICA and GIZ, take a community-based approach to climate adaptation. Germany’s GIZ, for example, carries out community-level adaptation activities for all beneficiaries in the Pacific; and USAID has highlighted its community-level projects as important models. Our recent evaluation of some of these community-level adaptation programs in Vanuatu and Kiribati found that they provide some development benefits, including increased awareness, empowerment, cooperation, and self-esteem, but that it is too soon to tell whether this approach can reduce long-term vulnerability to climate change.

Every year, millions of shorebirds migrate to the Arctic to breed—some coming from as far away as Australia and New Zealand—and then head back again. Nearly all of the birds making this journey spend time in the food-rich intertidal mudflats of the Yellow Sea ecoregion, on the east coast of China and the west coasts of the Korean peninsula. But as China’s economy has grown, around 70 percent of the intertidal mudflats in the Yellow Sea area have disappeared—the land drained and “reclaimed” for development. All of the more than 30 species of shorebirds that rely on the mudflats are declining, and those that stop there twice a year are declining at a faster rate than those that stop only once. If the current trajectory continues, the Yellow Sea—once known as the cradle of China—will become the epicenter of extinction.

“Water security and management represent the cornerstone of global conflict prevention,” said President Danilo Türk, chair of the Global High-Level Panel on Water and Peace and former president of Slovenia, at a recent Wilson Center event on water and peace. “The only alternative to water is water, and therefore, the matter of water is a matter of survival,” said Sundeep Waslekar, president of Strategic Foresight Group.

Climate change is “unfolding as we speak,” said John Agard, professor of Tropical Island Ecology at the University of the West Indies (UWI) at a recent public forum on island nations hosted in Trinidad by UWI’s Institute of International Relations. The “close coupling of terrestrial, coastal, and marine systems” in islands “results in fast-spreading impacts across systems,” said Roger-Mark De Souza¹, formerly the director of population, environmental security, and resilience for the Wilson Center, which partnered with UWI and American University’s Center for Latin American and Latino Studies to organize the event.

“Resilience isn’t an outcome,” said USAID Resilience Coordinator Greg Collins at a recent Wilson Center event on measuring resilience; it is “the ability to manage adversity and change without compromising future well-being.” The wide array of individual factors that contribute to building resilience—ranging from livestock insurance and microsavings, to risk tolerance and women’s decision-making—can be challenging to measure individually, let alone in concert. But this assessment is essential for designing and implementing successful development projects: “We have to be able to answer the question: Is this building resilience, yes or no?” said Cornell University’s Chris Barrett.

Without warning, water rushed into a woman’s home on a raised platform above the floodplain of Bangladesh’s Teesta River. She was just a hand’s distance from her infant son, but she couldn’t stop him from falling into the floodwaters. “She can’t recover back from the trauma,” said the University of Dundee’s Nandan Mukerjee of the mother who lost her child to the currents of climate change.

The summer of 2017 was a stark reminder that climate change exacerbates both the intensity and frequency of natural disasters—and that the most vulnerable people are most severely affected. A recent study shows that from 2004-2014, 58 percent of disaster deaths and 34 percent of people affected by disasters were in the most fragile countries, as measured by the Fragile States Index. Disasters in these countries receive considerably less media coverage than the recent hurricanes that hit the United States. This lack of attention also leads many policymakers to overlook a possible opportunity: By working together to reduce fragility and vulnerability, could we not only better prepare for disaster, but also help prevent conflict? We have the policy tools to take an integrated approach to climate, conflict, and disaster—but we need the political will to use them.