Every year, around this time, the world pauses to talk about the planet. Speeches are made, pledges are renewed, and photographs of melting glaciers circulate on social media. Then, for most of the world, life goes on.
Earth Day began in the United States on April 22, 1970, when 22 Americans took to the streets demanding cleaner air, cleaner water, and a government that took the environment seriously.
It was, at its core, a movement -- angry, urgent, and effective. Within months, the US Environmental Protection Agency was established.
Over the following decades, Earth Day spread across the world and is now observed in more than 190 nations. This year's global campaign, Our Power, Our Planet, calls for a tripling of renewable energy by 2030.
The ambition is right. The gap between that ambition and actual delivery, however, remains the central problem -- and nowhere is that gap more visible than in Bangladesh.
The crisis that wealthier nations still debate in conference rooms is already inside people's homes here -- in the saltwater creeping into paddy fields in Satkhira, in the flooded alleys of Dhaka after a single hour of rain, in the unbearable heat that now arrives earlier each year and lingers longer than it used to.
Bangladesh has not been warned that climate change is coming. It has already arrived, and it has settled in.
This is what makes the annual Earth Day ritual feel, from a Bangladeshi vantage point, somewhat surreal. The international framework -- the Paris Agreement, the IPCC reports, the climate finance pledges -- exists on paper in considerable detail.
The goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C is written down. The principle that industrialized countries, having built their prosperity on carbon-heavy growth, should bear a greater share of the burden -- that is written down too.
What is not happening is delivery. Money pledged in Glasgow or Dubai takes years to arrive, if it arrives at all. When it does, it rarely matches the scale of what communities actually need.
Bangladesh's emissions are a rounding error in global terms. Yet its people are paying a price that should, by any fair measure, fall on others.
That said, Bangladesh has not simply waited for the world to act. The country has done things -- genuinely impressive things. Its cyclone preparedness system, built painstakingly over decades, has turned what once were mass-casualty disasters into manageable emergencies.
Farmers in coastal districts are quietly switching to salt-tolerant rice varieties nobody required them to adopt. Community volunteers man flood shelters before storms even form in the Bay.
This is not the response of a helpless country. It is the response of a country that has learned, out of necessity, to take care of itself.
But necessity has its limits. The adaptation work happening at the grassroots level -- the pilot projects on rainwater harvesting, the climate-resilient housing experiments, the local early warning networks -- mostly stays small.
It stays small because financing is scarce, because coordination between government agencies is patchy, and because political attention tends to arrive after disasters rather than before them.
A working model in one village does not automatically become policy. That gap -- between what works locally and what gets implemented nationally -- is one of the country's most persistent and costly failures.
Cities add another layer of difficulty. Dhaka alone absorbs hundreds of thousands of migrants every year, many displaced in part by environmental pressures in coastal and riverside districts.
The city is not built for them, and it is certainly not built for a warming climate. Waterways have been encroached upon. Green space has been consumed by construction. Drainage infrastructure, where it exists, was designed for a different era and different rainfall patterns.
Pointing to individual behaviour -- people should recycle, people should use less plastic -- is not wrong, but it puts the cart before the horse. Systemic change has to come first, and it has to come from the top.
None of this means Bangladesh should sit back and wait for the world to fix things. It should not, and largely it has not.
But there is a difference between adapting to a problem and accepting responsibility for it. Bangladesh can do the former without conceding the latter.
The international pressure for fair financing, for genuine technology transfer, for binding commitments with teeth -- that pressure must not let up. If anything, it needs to grow louder.
Earth Day tends to generate a particular kind of optimism: Measured, carefully worded, full of phrases like "we are moving in the right direction." Perhaps that is true, in the broadest sense.
But the right direction at the wrong pace is still the wrong answer. For the families in Khulna watching their land disappear, for the workers in Dhaka fainting in buildings without cooling, for the farmers in Sylhet whose crops flooded again this season -- the pace of global action is not an abstraction. It is a lived reality, and it is not good enough.
Earth Day is worth observing. But it is worth more if it produces honesty than if it produces comfort.
Nazmun Naher is a water resources expert with extensive experience in regional and international integrated water resources management. She is currently engaged in academia and the development sector, working to advance water security.