Cloudy, with a chance of speech blurbs: A new graphic novel on climate change

The stories, set across three continents and five countries, are fictional; the research is real. The authors of Everyday Stories of Climate Change — environmental researchers Gemma Sou of the University of Manchester, Adeeba Risha from BRAC University in Bangladesh and Gina Ziervogel at the University of Cape Town — have conducted field studies over the past seven years. Sou as a developmental geographer, exploring how state power and citizen agency interact to shape disaster experiences in Latin America, the Caribbean and the UK. Risha as a climate change impact researcher in Bangladesh, with a special focus on changing migration patterns and environmental policies. And Ziervogel in Cape Town, where she studies how citizens and local governments are responding to a growing water crisis in urban areas.

The result is stories representing the daily lives of five imagined families, one each in Bangladesh, South Africa, Bolivia, Puerto Rico and Barbuda. Panels illustrated by British artist Cat Sims seek to capture the physical and psychological toll of living in a country battered by the climate crisis, while having only very limited access to the resources required to rebuild or adapt. Any of these stories could be true. Take a look.

In Bangladesh’s Khulna, where rising sea levels have flooded a local river, a mother of two named Rohima must walk for hours every day, an infant in tow, to collect water. (Real-world studies conducted by the World Bank between 2012 and 2016 have shown how local rivers have grown in salinity levels, a situation that is expected to steadily worsen.)

On the outskirts of the town of Toa Baja in Puerto Rico, Luisa has had no electricity for three months, since a hurricane hit. She depends on food aid because the prices of commodities have shot up and her husband, a factory worker, has been jobless since the disaster.

Elna, who lives in government housing, struggles to pay her rising water bills in drought-affected Cape Town, South Africa.

In Codrington, Barbuda, nine months after Hurricane Irma, local fishermen sit by their battered boats, still unable to resume fishing. Private developers are attempting to displace them to build luxury hotels. They are fighting back, working with NGOs to save their land.

In the real world, the struggle is tangled. Seawalls have been built in parts of Bangladesh to reduce the impact of cyclones and storms, but they have also blocked the flow of rivers, in places, worsening the country’s already chronic flooding. In Puerto Rico and Barbuda, in the comic panels and the real world, there is a growing, ever-present fear, as hurricanes become more frequent and more intense.

“The idea was to give the people we call ‘climate victims’ a face, voice, personality and identity while challenging the idea that they are helpless or passive in the face of adversity,” Sou says.

The graphic novel gives each of its protagonists an arc defined by hope. Using simple, low-cost strategies, they find ways to rebuild and adapt even without the support that is their due.

In Khulna, Rohima begins to harvest rainwater and grow vegetables in containers, to work around the saline soil. In Puerto Rico, Luisa begins to raise chickens and grow vegetables to feed herself and her family. Noelia is trying to save enough to build her family a sturdy home that can withstand the landslides to come.

But these are, of course, stopgap solutions. Most of Luisa’s chickens will not survive another hurricane. Rohima will need to contend with flooding and erratic rainfall. The sturdiest home can only withstand so many landslides, and there is the loneliness and grief Noelia battles, away from her children and her home.

The format helps focus on character-driven narratives, she says, and allows one to move swiftly through a character’s experiences, leading to more engaging and effective storytelling.

“The one thing we have been very mindful about is to not romanticise people’s story or their capacity to thrive in the face of adversity,” Sou adds. “Governments and international organisations must be more involved to better infrastructure, subsidise commodities and support low-income families so that the responsibility of overcoming the hardships of climate change does not fall upon the affected people.”

The print version of Everyday Stories of Climate Change (it is available online free) was released in India in February, via the not-for-profit publisher Eklavya Foundation. It is available in English and Hindi, priced at ₹100.

“Launched during the World Book Fair in Delhi, our initial feedback from children, parents and educators was that the book served as an engaging way to understand the abstract idea of climate change impact. We are hoping to find more publishing partners so we can translate the book into other Indian languages for a wider audience,” says Shailaja Srinivasan, who handles translation rights and book promotion at Eklavya Foundation.

It’s a slim book of 37 pages, but Sou asks that you dwell on each tale. “We could not include every finding. So we ask that readers bring their own knowledge of the world in,” she says, “to fill in the gaps, silences and blank spaces in the comic.”