More than 17 years ago, I came to the United States as part of a refugee group known as the “Lost Boys” of Sudan. In 1987, civil war separated me from my parents for almost 10 years. After 13 years of living in limbo in refugee camps, I was given the opportunity to settle in Tucson, Arizona, where I quickly integrated myself into the American society as a productive citizen. My story demonstrates the resilience paradox: Exposure to prior hardships helps us become more resilient.

The Columbia River basin—which spans four U.S. states, two Canadian provinces, and 32 Tribal Nations or First Nations—touches the lives of more than five million people each day. The basin’s 250 hydroelectric dams power everything from Google’s data center to irrigation pumps that spread water onto fields of alfalfa and potatoes. Steelhead trout and salmon rely on the river to spawn. Ships and tugboats transport millions of tons of cargo to and from the Pacific Ocean.

“Resilience isn’t an outcome, it is a process—and capacity-building is crucial,” said Chelsea Keyser, Deputy Chief of Party for USAID’s PREPARED program, during a recent event at the Wilson Center marking the end of the five-year project. PREPARED (Planning for Resilience in East Africa Through Policy, Adaptation, Research, and Economic Development) developed 14 different tools to help communities adapt to the impacts of the changing environment in the East African region, including unreliable rainfall and rising temperatures.

Every dollar invested in preparing for natural disasters could save seven dollars, said Alice Hill, Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, at a recent briefing on Capitol Hill. Catastrophic events like Superstorm Sandy present significant financial risks to U.S. businesses, the federal treasury, and the global economy. These complex emergencies have taught us that “everything is connected: our transportation system failed, our health sector failed,” said Hill, in the wake of these storms.

As India faces an emerging cancer crisis, how do South Indian women conceptualize what causes reproductive cancers—and how to cure them? New qualitative research from Cecilia Van Hollen, a medical anthropologist and Wilson Center Public Policy Fellow, illuminates the complex perceptions and personal experiences of women in Tamil Nadu, the first state to integrate cancer screening into its primary health care system.

As the Atlantic hurricane season kicks off this month, some coastal communities in the United States and small-island nations in the Caribbean are still recovering from last year’s record-breaking damage. At the same time, the heavy rains pounding the East Coast this week are part of a long-term trend towards more severe heavy rainfall events that have led to deadly floods and threaten critical U.S. military bases. Even on sunny days, cities such as Norfolk and Manila contend with high tide or “nuisance” flooding—a phenomenon that has increased as much as nine-fold since the 1960s, according to NOAA.

“Community mobilization, local capacity-building, and innovation are the cornerstones of successful development. And that for us includes resilience,” said Franklin Moore, Africare’s Chief of Programs, at a Wilson Center event on family planning and sustainable development. As rapid population growth intersects with challenges like food insecurity and water scarcity, communities in developing countries need not only the capacity to absorb short-term shocks, they also need transformative capacity to address long-term challenges.