Enduring and surviving the climate crisis – in pictures
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In the Afghan city of Bamiyan, young girls are caught by a sandstorm on their way to school. The city, surrounded by steep mountain slopes and deep valleys, has harsh winters and has experienced climate and weather extremes in recent years. Afghanistan has faced an extreme drought since 2018 that affected 2.2 million people. In the first quarter of 2020, more than 40,000 Afghans had to leave their homes due to natural disasters. Almost every day, Afghans experience restrictions due to conflicts and sudden extreme weather.
Photograph: Solmaz Daryani/Climate Visuals Countdown
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In the difficult coastal terrain of West Bengal, India, conventional supply of electricity is made difficult by storms, thundershowers and heavy rainfall. But windmills have changed the scenario as they take advantage of the normal coastal breeze. The dynamics of conventional rural living have changed, and power can now reach remote areas.
Photograph: Amitava Chandra/Climate Visuals Countdown
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Locals look at burning forest during a wildfire on the Greek island of Evia. When trees burn, they release the carbon stored within them into the atmosphere. The effect of wildfires on emissions is one of the most feared climate feedback loops. More burning only means more global warming, which leads to more burning still. As drought and heat continue with rising greenhouse gas emissions, we expect more wildfires in years ahead. The fact that global warming is now hitting its wealthiest citizens is a sign of just how hard, and how indiscriminately, it is hitting.
Photograph: Milos Bicanski/Climate Visuals Countdown
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The Innovafeed plant in Nesle, France, opened in November 2020 and it is the world’s largest operating production unit of insect proteins. The site produces insect proteins and oil derived from black soldier fly (Hermetia illucens) larvae for animal and plant nutrition. The production unit is co-located with a starch manufacturer which provides wheat waste for insect feeding, and with a biomass plant which powers the site with 100% renewable energy. The company estimates that this cooperation will save 57,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.
Photograph: Simone Tramonte/Climate Visuals Countdown
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This shot sums up the life of a boy who begins dirty and dangerous work in a coal mine, walking through coal dust, risking danger from pollution and unsafe working practises.
Photograph: Rajesh Kumar Singh/Climate Visuals Countdown
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A family departs after leaving their recently-deceased relative in this forest-to-be, which is part of an initiative trying to recover the Paramo de Guerrero, an Andean ecosystem in Colombia. The unique region, which is being exploited and contaminated by uncontrolled mining, hosts the Neusa, a body of water that is vital for the country’s capital, Bogota. Colombia Reserva Ambiental, an NGO, has planted 7,000 trees all over these misty mountains, and in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, ashes are being buried here as a ceremonial act to motivate people to grow a tree and name it as the loved one they’ve lost to the disease. It will take 20 years to cover all this territory.
Photograph: Ivan Camilo Ospina/Climate Visuals Countdown
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A woman completing paperwork by the light of her solar-powered lamps in a village shop for solar products.
Photograph: Kunal Gupta/Climate Visuals Countdown
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Qeqertaq Arnatassiaq and Niels Molgard push an iceberg so that it doesn’t drag down their fishing nets. Ever more icebergs are being calved by glaciers in Greenland due to the effects of climate change. Those Icebergs drift away and take the fishermen’s nets with them, causing financial and environmental losses on the seabed. The melting ice, accelerated by global warming, frees up the ocean for nearly eight months of the year now – it was five months 20 years ago – on the southern and western parts of the island. Greenland, eager to overcome its economic, and ultimately political, dependence vis-a-vis Denmark, is faced with a dilemma: the exploitation of resources that are challenging to harvest, versus the preservation of its environment.
Photograph: Turpin Samuel/Climate Visuals Countdown
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Cape Town’s Muizenberg beach is a popular surf spot on the Zandvlei estuary, which has been negatively affected by urban development. As part of its management approach, the South African capital uses bulldozers to open the estuary mouth at certain periods, typically around the spring tides, to allow seawater in. Climate change threatens estuaries worldwide, making effective management essential.
Photograph: Brendon Bosworth/Climate Visuals Countdown
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Amazonian women during the mobilisation for International Women’s Day on 8 March 2020. One of the strongest demands of Amazonian women has to do with the sovereignty of their ancestral lands, which are constantly violated in favour of mining and oil companies, ignoring the rights of nature and the people who inhabit these territories.
Photograph: Karen Toro/Climate Visuals Countdown
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It is not yet dawn, but Mike Winkler, a Quinault Indian, has already been digging in the wet sand along the edge of the ocean for hours. He is looking for razor clams, a protein staple that the Quinault Indian Nation have harvested from these coastal flats for more than 10,000 years. Last year, the Tribal council voted to permanently relocate the village of Taholah, Washington state, away from the coastline and the mouth of the Quinault River. The growing risk of inundation – being covered by water – had become too great.
Photograph: Michael Snyder/Climate Visuals Countdown
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The Orkney Islands are geographically and meteorologically unique. Their location at the meeting point of the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea leaves the islands exposed to incessant heavy winds and waves and exceptionally strong currents and tides. This abandoned test site for tidal energy is located at the Fall of Warness, off the island of Eday. The open-centred turbine was installed in 2006 and was the first tidal turbine to deliver electricity to the UK’s national grid.
Photograph: Matjaz/Matjaz Krivic/Climate Visuals Countdown
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‘We are grateful to the ocean,’ says Jazaa. She has been working as a seaweed farmer for almost 10 years. She carefully attaches little seaweed seedlings to the rope that she will harvest after two months. When the water goes out with the low tide, the coast of Zanzibar transforms into the desert. White sandbanks stretch for miles with shallow pools, rows of sticks and hundreds of seaweed farms. Zanzibar is the world’s third largest exporter of seaweed in the world.
Photograph: Natalija Gormalova/Climate Visuals Countdown
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Shaban Mwinji, a community scout ranger, stands in a restored mangrove forest in Ukunda, Kenya. The Mikoko Pamoja community-led mangrove conservation and restoration project is the world’s first blue carbon project. It aims to provide long-term incentives for mangrove protection and restoration through community involvement and benefit.
Photograph: Anthony Ochieng/Climate Visuals Countdown
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Billal Hossain breaks up his house and collects the last bricks to shift to another place to settle. Thanks to the climate crisis, his house was washed away. Bangladesh is one of the country’s most likely to suffer adverse affects from anthropogenic climate change.
Photograph: Moniruzzaman Sazal/Climate Visuals Countdown
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The Gepang Gath glacier and its proglacial lake are situated at an altitude of 14,000 feet in the Chandra basin, Himachal Pradesh, India. Over the last 40 years, the lake volume has increased by over 20 times due to melting and calving glacier fragments. This lake is a potential candidate for a glacial lake outburst flood event and could threaten several villages downstream and a national highway. Glaciologists regularly monitor changes to the glacier and lake that occur due to increasing temperatures.
Photograph: Rakesh Rao/Climate Visuals Countdown
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Taking the future for a test spin in one of the coldest regions on Earth. This is the site of winter testing for a number of electric-car manufacturers. Pictured here is the prototype of a Chinese-Slovenian joint venture, APG-Elaphe.
Photograph: Matjaz Krivic/Climate Visuals Countdown
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The startup company Climeworks placed turbines on the roof of an incineration plant to suck up carbon dioxide directly from the air. Right next to the incineration plant lies a complex of greenhouses that uses the captured gas to boost the production of tomatoes and other vegetables.
Photograph: Matjaz Krivic/Climate Visuals Countdown
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Two wind technicians secure themselves to the top of a wind turbine during annual inspection of the Roosevelt wind farm in eastern New Mexico.
Photograph: Joan Sullivan/Climate Visuals Countdown
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In order to find a solution for a future model of sustainable agriculture, Sergio Gamberini created Nemo’s Garden, the first underwater greenhouses in the world. This innovative experiment on the Italian Riviera aims to find a new sustainable agricultural system for the future, which can counteract the increasing pressures brought by the climate crisis.
Photograph: Giacomo d’Orlando/Climate Visuals Countdown
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A man works on his rooftop garden in Kolkata, India. Drought caused by global heating can make a significant impact on world food production. We can use our roofs as a secondary source of food production. We can help relieve pressure from industrial agriculture and save a significant amount of greenhouse gas emissions by using local produce in this way.
Photograph: Sudip Maiti/Climate Visuals Countdown
