Much of the time, discussion about climate change is focused on the future – How bad will it be? Will it lead to more conflict? Who will be most vulnerable? But it is in fact a current phenomenon. The climate system is already, for all intents and purposes, irrevocably changed and millions of lives have been changed along with it.

A series of short documentary films by Rockhopper TV, produced in collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation and the BBC, explores people’s efforts to adapt to extreme weather events in Cuba, France, and Australia.

Building Back Better in Cuba

In Cuba, Hurricanes Gustav and Ike destroyed almost 30,000 homes in 2008 and caused the evacuation of 2.5 million people. “You can imagine how I felt just watching, seeing my house, bit by bit, blow away to nothing,” Roberto Fuster tells the filmmakers.

Obdulio Coca, an architect with the University of Havana, says there isn’t enough money to retrofit all the buildings in Cuba. But he’s developing modular homes that could change over time to incorporate newer methods of construction, and critically, he says, include a core safe area made of concrete to shelter families from storms.

Fuster and his family were saved during Gustav by crowding into a neighbor’s home that was made of concrete alongside six other families. Now, as he rebuilds by hand, he’s added a concrete bathroom to the center of his house.

Forecasting in France

In Europe, a two-week heat wave in 2003 killed as many as 70,000 people. More than 1,000 Parisians, the majority them elderly, died from heat-related causes. “Never had we seen this number of deaths,” a city health worker tells the filmmakers.

The French meteorology office estimates the number of heat wave days will increase from an average of 3 at the beginning of the century to around 40 by the end. In response, the office has developed early warning programs that can predict heatwaves and get the word out through local institutions, such as Paris’ ubiquitous bakeries.

“I am very committed to the cause,” explains the health worker. “If a rich country like France is unable to set a good example by coming up with measures to help its population cope, how would developing nations, who have no economic infrastructure, cope?”

Managing Water in Australia

Along the Murray River in southern Australia, farmers and herders are giving up after an unprecedented seven years of drought. “Six years ago, the warning signs should have been up there, saying the river’s in trouble, it’s not flushing out, it’s not flowing,” says Leslie Fisher, touring what used to be a lake bed on a four-wheeler. “Nothing was done.”

Fisher and her husband owned 700 cattle and were eventually forced to sell them as the lakes shrank and grasslands dried up. Farmers along the Murray River provide nearly half Australia’s food supply, say the filmmakers, and the Murray provides almost all the water to the city of Adelaide, home to 1.3 million people.

“I would urge every country around the world to come and look at Australia and learn how not to plan for climate change,” says Professor Mike Young of the University of Adelaide. Decision-makers assumed the drought would last only a year or two before a return to normal, causing an overreaction in water management. Dams were opened and marshlands closed to capture as much water as possible, but years later, many reserves are now dangerously low, causing acidity that makes what little flow is left unusable in places.

“At some stage, possibly in the very near future, the entire system is going to become undrinkable,” says Young.

The short films are a vivid reminder that climate change is here and now, not solely in the realm of projections and possibilities. The story of how people react and adapt to these changes will be the story of this century.

Rockhopper has more short films on their Vimeo page, on climate as well as food and global health, and the Rockfeller Foundation recently announced a major commitment to climate resilience in collaboration with USAID.