The Original Story
Before Unequal Climate was a project, it was a place — the karst mountains of Guizhou, where water vanishes into stone, and where the climate broke quietly, unevenly, long before the world was watching.
01 · The Land
Guizhou sits on one of the largest karst formations on Earth. Rain does not gather here — it drains through fissured limestone into rivers that run entirely underground. Villages perched above the stone have always lived one dry season away from scarcity.
To outsiders the mountains look timeless. To the people who farm them, they are a ledger of small, accumulating debts: thinner soil, weaker harvests, longer walks to water.
"The mountains were never still. We just learned to call the stillness normal."
02 · The Fracture
Stony desertification crept across the hillsides first — soil washed off the limestone until only bare rock remained. Then the water came all at once. Flash floods and landslides, arriving faster on stripped slopes, turned years of slow decline into single nights of loss.
Returning home after the disaster, the landscape no longer matched memory. This is what climate change looks like before it becomes a statistic: a field that is gone, a house that is gone, a silence where a routine used to be.
"It did not feel like weather. It felt like the land had stopped protecting us."
03 · The Awakening
At Model United Nations, the abstract language of climate policy — loss and damage, mitigation finance, differentiated responsibility — suddenly described something specific: home. The floods had a vocabulary. The inequality had a mechanism.
That recognition is the origin of Unequal Climate: the decision to stop treating the crisis as distant weather, and start documenting who it actually reaches first.