By Karim Shallwanee
A few years ago, while filming in one of Pakistan’s remote mountain communities, I sat with an elder who spoke about a glacier overlooking his village. He wasn’t a scientist, and he didn’t speak in the language of climate reports. Instead, he spoke about memory. He remembered where the ice once reached, when the snow used to arrive, and how the seasons could once be trusted. Then he paused and asked a simple question: What will be left for our grandchildren?
That question has stayed with me ever since.
Every year, World Environment Day arrives with a familiar flurry of warnings about rising temperatures, shrinking forests, and deteriorating air quality. For a country like Pakistan—consistently ranked among the most climate-vulnerable nations in the world—these are not abstract concerns. They are realities we experience through devastating floods, prolonged droughts, extreme heatwaves, and changing weather patterns that disrupt lives and livelihoods.
Yet despite the growing urgency of the crisis, there remains a disconnect in how we talk about it.
For too long, climate change has been confined to the language of experts. We discuss percentages, projections, policy frameworks, and scientific indicators. The science is essential and undeniable. But for many people, it can feel distant from the realities they live every day. A farmer watching crops fail, a family coping with water shortages, or a community facing repeated disasters does not experience climate change as a graph or a statistic. They experience it as uncertainty, loss, and difficult choices about the future.
When climate conversations become purely technical, we risk losing sight of the people at the centre of the story.
As a documentary filmmaker, I have learned that stories often succeed where statistics cannot. Over the years, I have spent time with communities across Pakistan and the broader mountain regions of South and Central Asia. Again and again, I have met people who can describe environmental change not through data points but through lived experience. They talk about springs that no longer flow, grazing routes that have disappeared, harvests that have become unpredictable, and traditions that are increasingly difficult to sustain.
Long before I understood the scale of the climate crisis through reports and research, I understood it through these conversations.
Storytelling has a unique ability to bridge the gap between scientific reality and human experience. A documentary about a family struggling with water scarcity can create a connection that no spreadsheet ever could. It reminds us that climate change is not simply happening to the environment; it is happening to people. It is reshaping communities, livelihoods, cultures, and futures.
This belief is at the heart of Voices from the Roof of the World (VRW), an initiative that uses filmmaking to amplify the experiences of communities living on the frontlines of climate change across South and Central Asia. Through these stories, audiences encounter not only the challenges these communities face but also their resilience, ingenuity, and determination to adapt in the face of profound change.
As a collaborative effort of Aga Khan Development Network agencies—including Aga Khan University, AKAH, AKF, and the University of Central Asia—and made possible through the generosity of donors such as the Jenabai Hussainali Shariff Family and the Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan Fund, VRW seeks to ensure that the people most affected by climate change are not reduced to footnotes in a global conversation. Their experiences deserve to be seen, heard, and understood.
What has struck me most throughout this work is that the communities contributing least to the climate crisis are often those carrying its heaviest burdens. Yet despite the challenges they face, they continue to demonstrate extraordinary resilience and hope.
This World Environment Day, we must continue investing in science, policy, and innovation. But we must also invest in stories. Because meaningful action begins with connection. When people see themselves reflected in the realities of climate change—when they recognize that behind every disappearing glacier, failed harvest, or flash flood is a family trying to hold on to its future—the crisis becomes more than an environmental issue.
It becomes personal.
And when something becomes personal, we are far more likely to act.
