RIFAT ANIK

Telling stories of the people overlooked, the planet under stress, and the progress possible.

Curious about how people are shaping the planet, and how the planet is reacting to affect all living things and systems back. Being trained in environmental sciences at Gettysburg college, while gathering multidisciplinary skills to tell these stories, which started back in high school in Dhaka.

Researching and documenting over the summer in Tanzania

Tanzania, 2026

Documenting Maasai Displacement causing cultural erosion

Young Maasai men who migrated to Dar es Salaam are adapting to city life as security guards, threatening their indigenous knowledge.

Researching ethanol cooking transitions in Dar es Salaam

Households are adopting ethanol stoves but not the fuel, and that gap is where the transition is failing.

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Filming a Zanzibar fishing community celebrate the science they enabled, and the gratitude owed to them.

Zanzibar, 2026

Sea cucumber fishers in Uzi spent months helping National Geographic Explorer Taylor Bratton understand their practices; she came back to say thank you.

View ↗

The women of a disappearing island, losing their land, their livelihoods, and their mental health to the sea.

Bangladesh, Brazil, 2025

Read Multimedia ↗ Watch Report ↗

As part of the Earth Journalism Network's non-economic loss and damage reporting fellowship, I worked alongside independent journalist, Usraat Fahmidah to document the mental health and livelihood struggles of a coastal sex worker community in Banishanta, whose island is slowly being reclaimed by the Bay of Bengal. The multimedia report was published on Asian Dispatch, and the documentary on their YouTube channel.

Screened the film at COP30 in Belém alongside loss and damage policymakers as negotiations reached a critical stage.

In collaboration with the Entertainment and Culture Pavilion, the screening opened a dialogue between the story of one disappearing community and the policy language being written about millions like them.

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The 36 hours Cyclone Remal gave a coastal Bangladesh community to survive

Bangladesh, 2024

View Trailer ↗ Read on The Business Standard ↗

We tracked Cyclone Remal's landfall zone and arrived ahead of the storm to document how systems fail the most underprivileged during disaster, sheltering with the community as it hit, filming through all of it.

The film screened immediately after at the Bangladesh Press Club, then at a multilateral dialogue where Zishan, a young man from the community, spoke for it himself.

Designing and delivering products at scale, across formats

Full Telecom Product Suite: Rivertel

New York, 2024

Designing the full product suite for a telecom company making communication affordable for migrant communities in New York.

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Report Design: World Bank Group

Bangladesh, 2022

Communicating complex research through design for the Bangladesh Country Climate and Development Report.

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Climate Atlas Bangladesh

Bangladesh, 2023

Building a beta tool to visualise Bangladesh's climatic stressors and the stories being reported from them.

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Filming stories of climate vulnerability and resilience from across Bangladesh

Bangladesh, 2024

Travelling across Bangladesh to document the stories of climate vulnerability and resilience hidden within, this is where my storytelling journey began, alongside my friend Abul Bashar Rahaman.

Supported by a grant from ICCCAD and numerous partners, the project was screened at COP28. We also built the Climate Atlas, a tool visualising climatic stressors across Bangladesh and the stories being reported from them.

View Trailer ↗ Climate Atlas ↗

Project Supported by

Get in Touch

rifatabraranik@gmail.com

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