What this heatwave is really telling us about Water
- Sumbul Mashhadi
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
Co-authored by Jyotsnarani Jena and Sumbul Mashhadi
Somewhere in Serbia this June, a river became a road. The Drina dropped so low that people crossed it on foot, walked across a river that has carried boats, borders, and stories for centuries. That image has stayed with us for two weeks now. Because while every headline about this heatwave screams temperature, we think the rivers are telling the truer story.
You have seen the numbers by now. Europe's hottest days on record, more than 1,300 people dead, most of them elderly, in homes never built for this. A heat dome smothering North America. Scientists saying this would have been virtually impossible without climate change. We won't repeat the whole grim scoreboard here.
What we want to say is simpler.
Nobody actually experiences "climate change." Nobody feels a global average temperature. What people feel in what shows up at the door, at the tap, in the field, is water. Too much of it. Too little. Too dirty. Or at the wrong place, at the wrong time.
That's how this heatwave was actually lived.
Too little
Thirty-one villages in Rajasthan, India, left queuing at a single hand pump after the canals shut down. Metro Vancouver, Canada (yes Vancouver, the rainiest place we know) banning lawn watering outright, lawns going gold across the city. Barges on the Rhine (Europe) sailing half empty because the river couldn't carry them full anymore.
Too much
On Canada Day, the sky over Ottawa let go pouring a record 118 mm of rain in a day, basements flooding, power out for thousands. In the Netherlands, a riverbank burst mid-heatwave and flooded a wedding with 150 guests in the middle of the ceremony.
Too dirty
In Kuttanad, Kerala (India), a land laced with canals, rivers and backwaters, Vinodini Raju rushes to fill every container when the supply comes, because the water surrounding her home isn't water her family can drink. Across India this summer, from Devprayag to Indore to Sopore, people marched with torches and empty pots protesting for the simplest of human needs that barely made a headline.
And then there's the fact we can't stop thinking about. In France, at least 74 people drowned during the heatwave. People went to the water to survive the heat, and the water took them. If you want one sentence that captures how unprepared we are, it's that one.
So what do we do with all this?
There is a certain irony that all of it unfolded during London Climate Action Week, while thousands of delegates discussed climate resilience in a city breaking a fifty-year heat record.
If climate change arrives through water, then protection has to arrive through water too. That means warning systems that actually reach people before the heat does. 1,300 deaths on the world's richest continent says they didn't. It means fixing the unglamorous things now, including the leaking pipes, the unshaded streets, the homes that turn into ovens. It means remembering that nature is infrastructure and investing in nature-based solutions. A restored wetland holds water through a drought and absorbs it in a flood, no committee required to set it up. And it means money. Water carries most of climate's damage but receives a sliver of climate finance, and that maths simply cannot hold another summer like this one.
But there is one more thing action needs. It is the thing we work on and that is attention. Things get funded when they get felt. A rainfall deficit is a number until it's a farmer's face. A drowned swimmer, a flooded wedding, a queue at a hand pump, all these are not anecdotes decorating the data. They are the data, in the only language most of us truly answer to.
So here is our ask, plainly. If this summer touched your water including your tap, your lawn, your river, your well, your basement, your fishing spot, your cancelled plans, tell that story. Send it to us, in whatever language it lives in.
The heat will break. It always does. Our job is to make sure someone's listening.
Please submit your story here.
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