In Koyra Number 6, a coastal hamlet bordering the Sundarbans in southwestern Bangladesh, a group of men unload barrels of water from their trawlers – 50 drums holding 30 liters each. They announce their arrival by yelling. And word spreads. This is how this village gets their daily drinking water, from a town nine miles away.

“Climate work is practical, common-sense, good development,” said Carrie Thompson, deputy assistant administrator at the Bureau for Economic Growth, Education, and Environment at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). “It’s prevention, and we all know that preventative medicine is the best medicine.”

The palm oil sector is at a crossroads. Despite growing awareness of its massive effects on deforestation, the largely unregulated and decentralized industry has struggled to adopt, follow, and document rigorous sustainable sourcing standards.

Among all the countries receiving agriculture and nutrition assistance through the U.S. government’s Feed the Future initiative, Bangladesh receives the third most, at approximately $50 million a year ($55 million has been requested for 2017). Yet Bangladesh’s population is larger than that of the two countries ahead of it, Tanzania and Ethiopia, combined.

Over the course of 1,800 miles, 5,300 vertical feet, and at least five name changes, the Brahmaputra River, in sometimes turbulent outbursts, flows from the Tibetan plateau to the Bay of Bengal. Along the way, it crosses three countries, including major geopolitical rivals China and India, and supplies 90 percent of downstream Bangladesh’s freshwater during the dry season.

Although separated by a thousand miles, the women of the Malaysian state of Sarawak and the Filipino island of Mindoro are united by a major struggle: climate change. As rainfall patterns grow increasingly unpredictable, natural disasters become more frequent, and drought ravages once-arable land, women are on the frontlines in both communities.

Near the corner of Broadwick and Lexington in London’s Soho neighborhood, a single spot on the ground has influenced more than 150 years of urban development. It’s the location of a water pump that in 1854 physician John Snow pinpointed as the source of contamination leading to a widespread outbreak of cholera in the neighborhood that killed more than 600 people.

If we are to avert the worst of climate change impacts, we need better tools for identifying patterns of displacement and migration around climate extremes. In vulnerable developing countries, increasingly frequent and intense storms will likely exacerbate current patterns of displacement and permanent migration. Displacement often leads to humanitarian crises in the short term and can derail progress toward development in the long term. Because of this dangerous potential, displaced persons and migrants are a common focus in humanitarian responses. However disaster responders must often “fly blind” without the benefit of current, accurate information about the worst-affected populations. To better respond to the impacts of climate change as they unfold, we will need more rapid, cost-effective, and accurate methods for identifying patterns of displacement and migration.