“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.

As the Climate Conference of Parties (COP-23) wraps up in Bonn, Germany, the prime minister of the tiny Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, which is sinking a few millimeters every year, made an impassioned call for transparency in the Paris Agreement “rule book” and for ratcheting up worldwide ambitions to reduce climate change.  While informal texts were drafted to guide implementation of the historic 2015 Paris Agreement, formal adoption of these rules will have to wait until COP-24, to be held in Poland next year.

The frontlines of climate change are the world’s shorelines. “It goes without saying that people living in coastal communities are already observing impacts,” said Erin Derrington, a coastal resources specialist working in the Northern Mariana Islands, at a recent Wilson Center event, the third in a series on coastal resilience presented in collaboration with the Hoover Institute and the Stanford Woods Institute on the Environment. “Although that is a challenge, it is also an opportunity and a driver for change and innovation,” said Derrington.

Hurricanes Irma and Maria devastated Puerto Rico, leaving many on the island without power, drinking water, or cellular service. Such disasters are not just an issue for the Caribbean, said the Wilson Center’s Roger-Mark De Souza in an interview with WOUB that was last month’s most read story on New Security Beat. All coastal areas of the United States, with their growing populations and vulnerable but valuable infrastructure, should be prepared to face more severe climate-related natural disasters.

Earlier this month, more than 40 people perished and 20,000 people were ordered to evacuate as Northern California faced some of its deadliest fires in decades. Potentially fueled by climate change, these fires—only the only the latest in a string of fires to strike the state—will reshape landscapes and lives, as I know well from personal experience on the other side of the world.

Water is a “strategic instrument in the creation of a safer, healthier, more nutritious, less aggressive world,” said Winrock International President and CEO Rodney Ferguson at the first event in a four-part series on water security organized by the Wilson Center and the Sustainable Water Partnership. Panelists at the event identified innovative and integrated efforts necessary to increase global water security in the face of growing water scarcity.