UMD 14 author: Zin Mar Latt Dr. Zin Mar Latt has taken a deep dive into the life of rural Myanmar and the heavy challenges people there face from not just environmental and natural disasters, but also the human-made responses and adaptations to them. The political and economic transformations accelerating across Myanmar have led to a vastly changed social landscape. In this new context, villagers in this area—which has experienced several flooding and erosion events in the last 50 years—now have to adapt a new set of tools to negotiate their livelihoods. As more frequent and extensive erosion and flooding becomes the norm, Shwetasoke locals have relied on not only traditional methods—familial and community networks, changing agricultural practices and religious space, as well as ritual cermonies—but have also put to work new tools of an independent press, social media and advocacy campaigns, and even engaging the researcher Zin Mar Latt herself as advocate-scholar to promote their agenda to academic and political actors at the regional and national levels. As climate change looms in the near future as activator and multiplier of the intensity of these kinds of natural disasters, Dr. Zin Mar Latt’s research stands as a critical case study of how communities exercise resilience to cope with drastic change and to maintain traditional ways of life, and also where they may be required to make serious adjustments, if not wholesale changes. Voices like this from the grassroots level will be crucial to fully seeing and understanding the extent and depth of rural transformation throughout Myanmar for policy-makers, aid agencies, and other communities that face a similar set of challenges moving into the future.