The story of Uma Tudu captures the endless cycle of poverty, violence, and suffering faced by too many girls in the northeastern Indian state of Assam.* At 16, following floods that destroyed her village, she traveled more than 1,600 kilometers to Delhi, lured by the promise of a good job and a good life. Instead she was sold as bonded labor.

“We don’t know the reason for the death of fish in downstream villages,” Hamberton Nongtdu, a mine owner from the northeastern Indian state of Meghalaya, told me.

As climate change upends established patterns of life, resilience – the ability of social and ecological systems to mitigate, endure, and adapt to short-term shocks and long-term stressors – has become a buzzword in development and humanitarian circles. [Video Below]

To stop and perhaps one day reverse climate change requires changes big and small. Despite the thousands of power plants burning coal and other fossil fuels today, nearly 3 billion people still depend on solid fuels, such as wood, dung, and crop residues, for their daily energy needs.

Despite some critics, the recent U.S.-China agreement over carbon emissions has sparked remarkable optimism in global climate negotiations. It’s also opened the door to new bilateral engagement between the U.S. and Chinese environmental communities on other issues, including China’s massive air pollution problems (16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities are in China).