To meet the climate challenge, city leaders are committing to ambitious emissions targets, designing decentralized action plans, and sharing lessons in transnational networks. Since growing cities are a large source of global emissions, their efforts could contribute substantially to global climate objectives. As the world’s climate experts gather next week in Bonn, Germany, for the 23rd Conference of the Parties (COP-23), urban initiatives will be a key focal point of the agenda-setting conversation.

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.

“Resilience means the ability to cope and move ahead,” said Joan Dalton, the gender lead at THINK Liberia during the second session in a series of conversations on resilience and health at the Wilson Center. As conflicts, epidemics, and natural disasters increasingly leave global health systems vulnerable to devastation, it is important to build resilient health systems through interventions that support community resilience, agreed global health experts at the panel event co-hosted by CARE and the Maternal Health Initiative.

Six years of brutal warfare have destroyed basic infrastructure in Yemen, Libya, and Syria.  While U.S. and European governments have been largely preoccupied with providing immediate assistance and dealing with refugees, international humanitarian organizations—such as the International Committee of the Red Cross and Doctors without Borders—are focusing on how to repair, maintain, and safeguard the facilities that provide essential services like clean water, sanitation, and electricity.  Yet these efforts are hindered by lack of resources, protracted violence, and—most insidiously—by the warring parties’ intentional targeting of humanitarian actors and environmental infrastructure. Just as the extensive damage from hurricanes in the Caribbean and southeastern United States has underscored the need for more resilient infrastructure, the wars of the Middle East show that protecting infrastructure is key to protecting civilians caught up in conflict.

While attention in the United States is focused on the disasters in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, a crisis across the Atlantic is rapidly becoming one of the worst humanitarian disasters since World War II. In the Lake Chad basin of West Africa, about 17 million people are affected by the emergency, struggling with food insecurity, widespread violence, involuntary displacement, and the consequences of environmental degradation. An estimated 800,000 children suffer from acute malnutrition; and although international donors pledged $672 million in February, the famine and humanitarian misery continues unabated. Suicide bombings and attacks by Boko Haram, which have killed at least 381 civilians since April 2017, have forced many people to leave their homes and farmers to leave their lands, interrupting livelihoods and reducing food supplies.

The devastation in Puerto Rico is shocking: Half of the population, or 3.4 million people, lack drinking water and 95 percent are without electricity even two weeks after Hurricanes Irma and Maria.

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.