“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.

“Floods are one of many factors that keep massive amounts of the population in poverty and always on the brink of disaster,” said Eric Viala at the second event in a four-part series on water security organized by the Wilson Center in cooperation with the Sustainable Water Partnership, which Viala directs. Panelists at the event discussed the impact of intense flooding on vulnerable communities and proposed innovative and collaborative approaches to reducing their risks in the face of disasters.

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.

$1 billion sales in two minutes. More than 250,000 purchases every second. Singles’ Day, China’s annual retailing extravaganza, absolutely crushes Black Friday: E-commerce giant Alibaba raked in $17.8 billion in gross sales during last year’s event, more than double the combined total of $6.8 billion in sales during the United States’ 2016 holiday shopping kick-off. The shopping spree lasts only 24 hours, but its environmental impacts will extend for decades.

“In the end, we all have to be accountable,” said Geoff Healy of BHP Billiton, the largest natural resource extraction company in the world, at a recent event on transparency, anti-corruption, and sustainable development at the Brookings Institution.

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.