![]() It's a beautiful privilege to try to help people get through the worst moments of their lives, but in doing it that way, which is quite stopgap, you know that you're going to be back at it. So that what I've described is kind of the difference between resilience and emergency, you know, relief, and we are very weighted as a government and as a donor community writ large toward-I mean, it's a beautiful thing. It's that so much of our resources go to keeping people alive in emergency circumstances, like those in Libya, just over the last week or those I mentioned in Pakistan or Somalia, and what you wouldn't do to be taking all of that humanitarian assistance and investing it instead in disaster-resilient infrastructure or in drought-resistant seeds or in those microloans, you know, to small farmers who are actually capable of using their smartphone to anticipate extreme weather events and at least mitigate what those losses are. ![]() Our resources are growing, but you just-you can't keep up. It happens just not to be what USAID works on, because we do our work overseas.Īnd our work, I will say one of the biggest tensions and challenges that we grapple with is we're given fixed resources, and resources that are not keeping up at all with the development setbacks the climate change is causing at all, at all, even though they're growing. But, I mean, the-also just the financial effects of the damage now being done on what feels like a near daily basis to some part of the United States can't be overstated. You know, when climate hits, whether in small and fleeting ways that have severe health impacts and severe lifestyle impacts, it is going to fall to the multitaskers of the home to manage that. And again, the disparate impacts, this is maybe a small example, but when a kid can't go to camp, it's going to be the working mom-but in most households, certainly mine-that is going to have to figure out what-you know, it's like a version of what happened with covid. ![]() For the first time, we had to shut down certain businesses and summer camps and opportunities for young people because of wildfire smoke extending into our lives. We've experienced our hottest day, week, and month on record, I think, just in the last couple of months. POWER: We live-I mean, we're, I think, on our 23rd natural disaster here in-that has cost over a billion dollars in the U.S.
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