Headshot,

My grandmother, Nanu, always talked about how the weather was changing. Though science was distant to her, perhaps changes accruing over decades felt too large to hold onto when she was busy preparing three meals a day for a household of a husband, six children, and a revolving door of guests, from visiting family to my grandfather's endless string of business partners. She spoke in Chattgaya, the language of her people from Chattogram, a lush port city in southeastern Bangladesh that the British colonized and renamed Chittagong, building it into the seaport they used to carry away the crops the land's own people had painstakingly grown. My mother grew up there too, in the hills above that same harbor, and she carried Nanu's Chattgaya with her, along with something harder to name: a way of watching the land change that had never needed a word like "climate" to feel true.

Nanu endearingly called me her Dinajpuri, after Dinajpur, a district in the Northwest, where my father's family is from. A region of mango and lychee orchards, where he still knows most of his childhood neighbors, whose humble homes have since been forced to "develop" into ten-story buildings, and whose open fields have been pushed to modernize a part of the country the state has otherwise left behind. My parents, raised on almost opposite ends of Bangladesh, settled together in the middle of it: Dhaka, a city of over twenty-six million people, many of them climate refugees who fled cyclones on the southeastern coast, drought in the northwest, flash flooding in the northeastern haor basin, and encroaching seas in the southwest, only to arrive in a capital where daily temperatures now regularly cross 100°F.

I came to the United States to study climate science in the hope of better understanding how to help my people, and I arrived proud, certain I was equipped to help answer these questions. Instead, my research keeps confronting me with how little we actually understand, and that gap leaves me flustered, sometimes empty. Working on papers about how natural variability and anthropogenic climate change are reshaping the hydroclimate, I've found that 2020s were among the driest years on record globally and yet the global soil moisture data I use shows conflicting trends over Bangladesh, because the data itself is too sparse, a gap shared by much of the Global South, from huge swaths of Central Asia to striking parts of Africa. In a field where we are using models to try to fix our future, it seems we are still struggling to understand our present.

That gap pulled me toward storytelling, where the datasets have gaps, the people living through these extremes do not. Conversation with NGOs in Bangladesh, Friendship and BRAC, working on the ground, who have spent years testing and applying flood-adaptive agriculture, embankment and char redesign, and community-led water management. These conversations gave me what my datasets couldn't - a record of people’s resilience and adaptation happening in real time, season by season. That record is what I illustrate. As I think of the world my younger sister and my future children will inherit, I want each panel to hold something more than warnings of catastrophe. Instead, my work here is centered beyond the trifles of these extreme events and how the climate is changing, but just as much on the resilience of the people living through it and how they are already adapting. The bottom of each panel isn't imaginations. They are assembled from practices already used by our people on the ground. A reminder of proof that our country has always known how to answer these extremes, and that this knowledge is worth stretching forward to 2075 rather than starting from scratch.