In 2023, two moments in and around Zinder, Niger, changed how I think about water security, both during the rainy season, when water appears everywhere. Along a highway, families filled containers from reddish-brown pools stained by the soil, water for drinking. Weeks later in the city, a woman offered me a cloudy glass harvested from her rooftop, because safe water was kilometres away. Water was present in both. Security was not. A simple lesson: availability is not the same

My journey in water began with a night I still don't like remembering. In June 2013 I was in Dehradun when the Kedarnath floods hit. More than 5,000 people dead, over 110,000 evacuated. But what I remember isn't the number. It's one woman in the relief area, who came home when her husband and son did not. She is the reason I chose water. Because nobody there experienced "climate change." They experienced a river. This is the story of what the number hides, and why I choose to

As a child in Kurdistan, I rationed every drop and imagined the rest of the world was blue. The place I envied most was Salt Lake City — a city so sure of its water it wrote it into its name. Then I flew there, the first flight of my life, and landed in a desert beside a lake retreating from its own shore. I had crossed the world to reach the wetter place, and the wetter place was drying too. There is no "there." There is one thirst, wearing different faces.

My neighbour Antonio has kept bees for thirty years; he once had a hundred and twenty hives. Today he has four, and so little honey he left it for the bees to eat. In Mendoza, where the province has seeded the clouds since 1959 and rainfall has fallen 25% in a decade, I keep asking the question the valley murmurs but rarely writes down: who does the rain belong to?

The headlines call this a heatwave. But from rivers you can walk across to floods mid-drought, climate change is felt through water and this summer, the water is telling us to act now.