Water variability is increasing “due to climate change and to more frequent natural disasters,” said Jonathan Cook, Senior Climate Change Adaptation Specialist with the U.S. Agency for International Development, at the fourth and final event in a series on water security organized by the Wilson Center and the Sustainable Water Partnership. To solve the problem of increasingly erratic water, “business as usual is really not acceptable anymore,” said Will Sarni, founder of WetDATA.org, who called for new, innovative ideas: “Hope is not a strategy.”

Blockchain, the newest technology poised to revolutionize numerous industries, could help decentralize electricity systems across Asia, Europe, Australia and the United States. In Brooklyn, peer-to-peer microgrids allow prosumers—energy consumers who generate small amounts of electricity from renewable sources—to trade energy with other users. Blockchain technology provides distributed ledgers that validate, record, and share each transaction, using smart contracts that automatically execute energy trades when the price and volume of the electricity transaction meet the contracted requirements.

Natural bioshields—wetlands, forests, and urban green spaces—are critical tools for reducing the impacts of disasters on vulnerable communities. Between 1994 and 2014, nearly 7,000 natural disasters occurred worldwide, causing an average of almost 68,000 deaths each year. Climate change, growing populations, and widening economic inequality are all expected to increase the impacts of disasters. Bioshields—nature’s own solutions to natural hazards—can help protect people from these dangerous floods, storms, and heat waves.

In 2014, we met with some of the technical leads of a major Chinese river basin authority in Beijing and asked them whether they were more worried about pollution or climate change impacts. Both, the engineers replied. Pollution affects us every day, they said, but changes in the climate erode our ability to supply drinking and irrigation water, manage floods, and generate electricity.

China must address its environmental and climate change challenges, such as reducing water pollution and building resilience to droughts, floods, and long-term climate shifts. But existing sources of finance have not met the growing demand for environmental projects.

“Most risk in African cities is not catastrophic. It’s not even episodic, but it is every day,” said Mark Pelling, a professor at King’s College, London, at a recent event on urban risk and resilience in sub-Saharan Africa. With rates of rural-to-urban migration reaching record highs, more than half of the urban residents in sub-Saharan Africa live in informal settlements, where they lack basic infrastructure and access to critical resources. Integrated projects like Pelling’s Urban ARK seek to build more resilient communities in cities and informal settlements. “African cities are dynamic and are growing,” said Pelling—but so is the vulnerability of their residents to environmental change, natural disasters, and conflict.

To further its goals to strengthen the global economy, China has already invested $300 billion of its pledged $1 trillion towards its Belt and Road Initiative—a massive infrastructure investment plan that spans 60 countries across Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. China’s initiative will shift the world’s political, environmental, and economic landscape.

Every year, millions of shorebirds migrate to the Arctic to breed—some coming from as far away as Australia and New Zealand—and then head back again. Nearly all of the birds making this journey spend time in the food-rich intertidal mudflats of the Yellow Sea ecoregion, on the east coast of China and the west coasts of the Korean peninsula. But as China’s economy has grown, around 70 percent of the intertidal mudflats in the Yellow Sea area have disappeared—the land drained and “reclaimed” for development. All of the more than 30 species of shorebirds that rely on the mudflats are declining, and those that stop there twice a year are declining at a faster rate than those that stop only once. If the current trajectory continues, the Yellow Sea—once known as the cradle of China—will become the epicenter of extinction.

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.