Field Note
For much of my professional life, I have worked on climate change through the lens of policy, institutions and international cooperation. Having spent countless hours in negotiation rooms discussing adaptation, mitigation, climate finance, resilience and loss and damage. But my deepest understanding of resilience did not come from those discussions and rooms. It came from sitting with families whose lives had been turned upside down by disasters and listening to how they made sense of loss without losing the hope for rebuilding their lives back again.
One of those moments came in Tonga after Cyclone Gita in 2018.
As part of a mission to support the country's recovery, I visited communities that had been severely affected by the cyclone. Homes had lost their roofs, trees lay uprooted and schools and community buildings bore the scars of powerful winds. Walking through one village, I met an elderly man standing outside what remained of his home. Much of the structure had collapsed and pieces of belongings gathered at one seemingly safe corner.
Asked him instinctively, “How are you managing?”
After a gentle smile, he replied, “The house can be rebuilt. We are thankful we still have each other.” A remarkably simple answer, yet filled with profound emotions. It has stayed with me ever since.
As we continued talking, he spoke less about what had been lost and more about what the village had already begun doing together. Families were sharing tools, repairing each another's homes, cooking together and making sure elders and children were looked after. There was no expectation that recovery would be quick. Instead, there was a quiet but compelling acceptance that rebuilding was a collective responsibility.
It was there that I witnessed resilience in its purest form!
Several years later, I found myself in the midst of a disaster of an entirely different scale and nature. The floods of 2022 affected millions of people across Pakistan.
I realized that my otherwise eventful and diverse professional life had not prepared me for the magnitude or impact. One-third of the country was under water. Millions were displaced. Entire villages disappeared beneath the floodwaters. As part of my responsibilities at the National Disaster Risk Management Fund, I travelled with colleagues to some of the worst-affected areas to understand the damage and support recovery planning.
One visit to Sindh remains particularly vivid.
We stopped at a small settlement where the floodwaters had only recently receded. The landscape was almost unrecognisable. Mud covered everything. Homes had collapsed into uneven piles of bricks and timber. Livestock had been lost, crops destroyed, and drinking water remained scarce.
Outside a temporary shelter sat a family of six.
The father welcomed us with remarkable warmth despite having almost nothing left. As we spoke, he explained that the floods had swept away their house, their small herd of animals, and the crops that had provided their livelihood. Everything they had built over many years had disappeared within days.
I found myself asking a question that felt almost inadequate — even irrelevant.
“What worries you most now?”
I expected him to speak about money or rebuilding his home.
Instead, he looked towards his children and quietly replied, “I just want them back in school. If they lose their education, then the flood will have taken more than our house.”
His wife, who had remained silent for much of our conversation, added something that I have never forgotten. “We will build another house,” she said. “But our children must not lose hope.”
As we prepared to leave, the family insisted that we share tea with them. I remember feeling deeply uncomfortable accepting such generosity from people who had lost almost everything.
Driving away that afternoon, I found myself reflecting less on the destruction I had witnessed and more on the extraordinary humanity I had encountered.
Those conversations fundamentally shattered my perspective of how I think about resilience.
Professionally, we get accustomed to describe resilience through frameworks, indicators and investments. We emphasis on resilient infrastructure, early warning systems, climate finance and building institutional capacity. All are essential components of an effective disaster risk management system. Without them, disasters become far more devastating than they need to be. Or they already are in the specific context of Pakistan.
But communities taught me that resilience begins long before governments, donors, or international organizations arrive. It continues long after the media have moved on and the disaster is no longer considered newsworthy.
It lives in parents who continue planning for their children's future after losing everything else. It runs through the neighbors like a binding force motivating for rebuilding other's homes before rebuilding their own. It permeates within the communities that refuse to let disaster define who they are. At the same time, I have become increasingly uncomfortable with how nonchalantly and unconcernedly we claim that resilience had been built.
Too often praising resilience risks normalising repeated suffering. I have observed this a lot more commonly exercised in my own country Pakistan. Communities should not have to prove their courage every few years because governments had failed to invest in preparedness. Politicians should not be allowed to build their political carriers on disasters and resilience of people and communities which they had been forced to endure. Because settlements had been allowed to expand into floodplains or because climate risks were ignored in development decisions.
The communities and people I met in two very different and distant places — Tonga and Sindh — were not resilient because they chose to live with disasters. They were resilient because they had no alternative. No choice to exercise. Their resilience deserves admiration. But it also demands accountability from those of us who work in public policy, development and climate governance and became victim of our own intellectual short-sightedness.
If there is one lesson these communities have left with me, it may be described as “the true measure of resilience is not how often people rebuild their lives after disasters. It is whether we, as policymakers and disaster management institutions, finally learn enough to ensure they no longer have to face such ordeals repeatedly.”
Whenever I hear the word resilience today, I no longer think first of policy frameworks or international agreements. I think of an elderly man in Tonga who reminded me that communities are stronger than cyclones. And of a father and mother in rural Sindh who had lost almost everything yet still worried about their children's future.
Those conversations taught me more about resilience than any conference room ever could.