Images from a Warming Planet
2016’s UN Climate Change Conference in Paris (COP21) was hailed as an historic landmark in the battle against climate change. For the first time, the majority of countries present committed to limiting global temperature increase to well below 2 degrees Celsius and urging efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees. It also placed binding obligations on developed countries to support undeveloped countries.
At the end of a 13-year journey to document the impacts of climate change on every continent, I obviously applaud this momentous agreement. But, and it’s a big but, having witnessed the scale of the destruction currently being wreaked around the world at a 1 degree rise and under, is this too little and too late?
In 2004 I spent a week on Shishmaref, a tiny island in the Chukchi Sea, between Alaska and Siberia. The small island is home to around 600 Inuits, whose houses were being washed into the sea. Sea ice used to form around their island home around late September, but with the Arctic being the most rapidly warming area of the planet, the sea ice wasn’t forming until Christmas time. This meant any early winter storms knocked great chunks off their island. I was to witness on Shishmaref something that I have seen many times since: those least responsible for climate change are most impacted by it.
My next shoot took me to Tuvalu, a tiny Pacific coral island country being swamped by sea level rise. More people climb Everest every year than visit Tuvalu. I timed my trip for the highest spring tides of the year. What I saw was completely shocking. With a flat calm sea, the tides rose so high, that they forced water up through the porous coral, flooding the centre of the island and leaving it in places three feet under water. The inhabitants, mainly Polynesian fishermen were utterly defenseless.
There followed photo shoots to cover drought and bush fires in Australia, drought and coal fired power stations in China, glacial retreat in Greenland, floods in Malawi, the world’s largest solar power station in California, floating houses to combat floods and rising seas in Holland, declining penguin populations in Antarctica, declining snow pack in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, the list goes on. I wanted to cover three main topics. What is causing climate change, the impacts this is having and what can we do about it.
On any journey like this there are inevitably high and lows. The biggest low was documenting the tar sands in Canada’s Northern Alberta, the most destructive environmental project on the planet. The rate of deforestation is second only to the Amazon rainforest, and the resulting synthetic oil has up to five times the carbon footprint of crude oil. Taking to the air, the scale of the devastation is breathtaking. As far as the eye can see, the forest has been destroyed and in its place a toxic wasteland of oily sludge is the legacy of greed that has driven this insanity. I was followed by oil company security guards and was stopped and threatened with arrest by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
This level of corruption is rife. Dr John O’Connor was the first person to document the huge spike in rare cancers in the first nation Canadians living downstream of the tar sands. When he approached the Canadian Government, asking them to undertake a health assessment on the community, their response was to charge him with five cases of gross professional misconduct.
The highs were truly uplifting. I spent three weeks in India documenting renewable energy. First in the Sunderbans, the Ganges Delta, where a solar project was delivering electricity to poor subsistence farmers for the first time. Each house had a battery that they carried to the solar station once a week to recharge. The battery was enough to recharge a mobile phone and provide light in their houses, avoiding the need to use highly polluting kerosene lamps inside. Around the world it is estimated that over a million people a year die from inhaling toxic kerosene fumes.
My visit to the Muni Seva Ashram in Goraj was utterly inspirational. The Ashram is a peaceful haven delivering cradle to grave services, schooling, and a state of the art cancer hospital, all powered by renewable energy. It was here that I photographed the world’s first and only solar crematorium, capable of dispatching four bodies a day, strictly in accordance with Hindu principles.
Climate change has accelerated entirely due to our own choices and actions. The impacts on people, wildlife and the environment I have witnessed over the last 13 years have at times been horrifying. We know what we need to do: keep fossil fuels in the ground, start using energy more wisely and truly valuing what it can provide for humanity.
I now plan to set up a climate change charity called Icommit. The idea is to get people around the world to commit to tackling climate change. One of the first steps will be to raise £50,000 to send a copy of the book to every world leader and every MP in the UK, as a start. Find out more about buying the book and getting involved in tackling climate change.