Girls and women bear the brunt of climate change impacts. Natural disasters kill more women than men: an estimated 90 percent of those killed in some weather-related disasters were female. The effects of climate change on natural resources can also further exacerbate existing gender inequalities.  Girls may be kept out of school to fetch water, as droughts drive them to walk farther and farther to find it. Seeking to stretch scarce household resources, families may marry off their daughters before the legal age and they may become more vulnerable to human trafficking after natural disasters.

“The United States and Russia… have found ways to continue to cooperate in the Arctic—particularly, but not only—through the Arctic Council, despite the difficulties on other issues relating to other parts of the world,” said Ambassador David Balton, deputy assistant secretary for oceans and fisheries at the U.S. Department of State at a recent Wilson Center forum on the Arctic.

The 1-2-3 punch of hurricanes Irma, Harvey, and Maria has made it devastatingly clear that extreme weather events can and will destroy families, interrupt livelihoods, and tear apart communities, particularly in coastal and low-lying areas of vulnerable regions like the Caribbean and the United States. 

“A monster”… “wreaking havoc”… “ripped through” the Caribbean and part of Florida: I heard these words as Hurricane Irma, the strongest Category 5 Atlantic hurricane on record, decimated the entire island of Barbuda and destroyed the four “most solid” buildings on St. Martin. And as I write this from the relative safety of Barbados, Hurricane Maria is on a similar path, leaving similar destruction in its wake. With winds of more than 160 miles per hour, Maria was the strongest storm to make landfall in Dominica. In a matter of hours, it devastated the country, regained its strength, and continued its onslaught on Puerto Rico and beyond.

“This is not an island issue, this is not a Caribbean issue, this is an issue that is [also] critical for us,” says Roger-Mark De Souza, the Wilson Center’s director of population, environmental security, and resilience in a recent video interview. “For us in the United States we have to continue to recognize that we ourselves are also vulnerable.” De Souza remains hopeful about the possibility of rebuilding and rebounding in the face of devastation, but also presses the importance of generating response mechanisms which address environmental hazards before they manifest into disasters. “That means planning, it means investing in community mobilization mechanisms, it means thinking about ways we provide humanitarian assistance.”

Island states contribute only .03 percent to global emissions, but “nineteen major Caribbean cities are in the bullseye of the climate threat” and Pacific island states such as Kiribati and Tuvalu face an existential threat from sea level rise, said Selwin Hart, Barbados’ ambassador to the Organization of American States and the United States. At the same time, Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in the Pacific and the Caribbean are leading efforts to combat climate change, said experts at the Wilson Center on July 10.

As the Senate returns from recess, passing the annual National Defense Authorization Act will be one of its top priorities—and this year it could include a potentially controversial amendment directing the Pentagon to assess the impact of climate change on national security. In the House, the Langevin amendment surprisingly garnered enough Republican support to withstand a challenge in July. Since then, two more senior military appointees have testified to the importance of understanding the challenges climate change poses to national security. 

Fear fends off disaster, but does fear give us the tools to manage risk? Do we need to spend precious time learning complex risk management techniques? Perhaps not: learning disaster reduction techniques could be as easy as playing a game.  “Well-designed games, like risk management measures, involve decisions with consequences. While games can never fully capture the complexity of climate risk management decisions, through gameplay these complexities can be revealed, discussed, and processed,” writes Pablo Suarez, the Climate Centre’s associate director for research and innovation.