Anyone visiting Singapore, as I did recently, quickly realizes it is exceptional. A tiny, rich, stable city-state of nearly 6 million people perched uneasily in a region of sprawling mega-countries full of poverty and instability, it also a thriving free market trading and financial center that is meticulously planned and where 80 percent of people live in public housing.

Perhaps the nearest analogue to Singapore is Venice in its heyday. Even Hong Kong and Luxembourg shelter in the protection of larger political entities. Singapore is even unique in its climate. No country is both warmer and wetter.

But look below the shining surface and Singapore faces essentially an existential threat. In fact, in many ways, it encapsulates the global climate crisis. However hard it works to protect itself and however capable its systems are, it cannot achieve security and prosperity without the cooperation of others beyond its borders.

With a security budget of nearly six percent of GDP, Singapore clearly values its independence and is prepared to pay for it. Climate change represents a threat to that independence, indeed to its very existence as a viable place to live.

While it has comprehensive coastal defense plans and perhaps the world’s most advanced water management system, nothing can protect low-lying Singapore from extreme climate change. Unless the world delivers faster and deeper emission cuts than agreed to at Paris last year, long-term sea level rise will reach over five meters (15 feet), and potentially much higher.

Now such extreme increases are not likely to be seen for another 200 to 300 years, but the trajectory to reaching those extremes is being determined by decisions made right now and once we’ve started down the path, there may be little we can do to reverse it. Countries do not discount their fundamental existence as if it was just any other economic investment.

Singapore is responding. Its highly sophisticated city administration is planning to manage the impacts of climate change within its direct control. It will strengthen sea defenses to deal with immediate sea-level rise. Through increasing water efficiency and capturing more rainfall it will try to ride out the longer droughts and more violent rainstorms it expects to experience. It has innovative plans to adapt housing and increase natural shading to ensure urban livability even as temperatures rise. Its sophisticated health care system will adapt to manage any spread of infectious diseases and ensure care for the elderly and vulnerable during heat waves.

In all of these areas, Singapore is model for other tropical countries, and many temperate ones too.

The problem is Singapore’s main vulnerabilities lie outside its borders. To prevent the most extreme sea-level rise scenarios, global emission pledges have to increase sharply as the Paris Agreement enters into force in 2020. The logic of climate diplomacy is that the best way to encourage others to do more is to reduce emissions more rapidly yourself, essentially relying on peer pressure.

But Singapore is limited in what it can offer in terms of cuts because its small land area restricts the availability of domestic renewable energy. It could connect to the plentiful renewable resources of its close neighbors through a regional grid. However, this would raises security concerns and political barriers, and require a high investment in diplomacy and relationship building.

Singapore gets plentiful rainfall and can ensure water security at home, but it still has to import 90 percent of its food. Even the most heroic attempts to increase local production will not change this. Singapore remains dependent on an open global food market where it can buy what it needs, and the food crisis of 2008-2009 showed this system can break down under multiple climate and economic stresses, which will increase rapidly in the coming decades.

Singapore’s adaptive capacity also rests on its ability to generate continued economic prosperity and the funds to invest in domestic resilience. The core of its economy is based around its role as the world’s largest container port and the key shipping link between China and Europe. Ironically the climate change induced melting of the Arctic threatens to undermine this position as shorter northern sea routes to Europe become viable. Singapore has even become an observer at the Arctic Council in order to monitor this threat. Even without competition from new shipping lanes, the Chinese “One Belt, One Road” initiative is beginning to move freight faster and safer across trans-continental railway lines than traditional shipping.

Singapore’s other key export earners are petrochemicals, finance, and insurance. The petrochemical industry will need to radically adapt to a low – and eventually zero – carbon world. The G20 Financial Stability Board has already identified a range of systemic risks to the financial and insurance sectors from climate change. Singapore will need to adapt its development plans to meet these new realities and take advantage of the growing markets in green finance and low carbon chemicals.

Finally, as Europe is currently experiencing, Singapore cannot isolate itself from human security crises in its close neighbors. If climate change and environmental stress are badly managed in Malaysia or Indonesia – or even further afield in Southeast Asia – Singapore will find itself a magnet for refugees, whether from natural disaster or social conflict.

Thus Singapore, despite its capabilities, is ultimately reliant on its neighbors and the global community to ensure its own security.

There are no walls high enough to insulate any of us from the consequences of extreme climate change. Singapore’s dilemma is not unique. Governments around the globe need to invest not just in more hardware, but in diplomacy and stronger international cooperation to reduce climate risks and manage unavoidable consequences.

As Singapore knows, this may involve working with and even depending on countries with which one has strong – even fundamental – disagreements and disputes in other areas. But we can’t wait for a perfect world to solve the climate crisis. We must come to grips with the world we have.

That is the real dilemma of climate change.