29 March 2023

Excellencies,

Ladies and gentlemen,

Earlier this month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – IPCC – confirmed that humans are responsible for virtually all global heating over the last 200 years.

The IPCC report shows that limiting temperature rise to 1.5-degree is achievable, but time is running out.

The window is rapidly closing to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis. 

Waterfalls pour off a Nordaustlandet ice cap in Svalbard, Norway, during an unusually warm summer in 2014.Courtesy of Paul Nicklen

Ten photographs that made the world wake up to climate change

By Nell Lewis, CNN

Published 4:34 AM EDT, Wed March 29, 2023

Editor’s Note: Call to Earth is a CNN editorial series committed to reporting on the environmental challenges facing our planet, together with the solutions. Rolex’s Perpetual Planet initiative has partnered with CNN to drive awareness and education around key sustainability issues and to inspire positive action.CNN — 

Water cascading from a wall of ice with gray brushstrokes of clouds overhead makes for a beautiful image – but the story behind it is one of destruction; Earth’s glaciers are melting at an unprecedented rate due to human-caused climate change.

Canadian photographer Paul Nicklen remembers taking the photograph. It was August 2014, and temperatures in Svalbard, Norway, were unusually warm – hovering above 70 degrees Fahrenheit (21 degrees Celsius). As he came around the corner of an ice cap on Nordaustlandet island, he saw more than a dozen waterfalls pouring off its face.

“It was the most poetic, beautiful scene I’d ever seen, but it was also haunting and scary,” he recalls. The picture came to symbolize the realities of climate change and became Nicklen’s best-selling fine art image. It appeared multiple times in National Geographic, was used by Al Gore in his climate talks, and graced the cover of Pearl Jam’s 2020 album “Gigaton,” the title of which refers to the unit used to calculate ice mass.

Its beauty is central to its impact, believes Nicklen. “When you take a photograph that is in focus, properly exposed, moody and powerful, it creates a visceral reaction,” he says. “It has to be beautiful and engaging, it has to invite you in … and it has to have a conservation message.”

In 2014, Nicklen, along with his wife Cristina Mittermeier, and later joined by Andy Mann (both also award-winning photographers), co-founded the nonprofit organization SeaLegacy, which uses film and photography to raise awareness of climate issues and help protect the planet.

“Photography is one of the most effective and powerful tools we have to tell complex stories, like the story of climate change,” says Mittermeier.

An emaciated polar bear staggers on the search for food. The photograph, taken in 2017, received widespread attention, sparking a conversation around climate change.Courtesy of Cristina Mittermeier