Picturing a well-adapted UK

These images of climate impacts were set alongside others of potential solutions, including deployable flood barriers, re-wetting of upland peat areas, urban greening, community agriculture and infrastructure development to protect rail lines from coastal development. These images help audiences to understand what adaptation looks like in reality – and see the work that is already underway up and down the country. 

We know from our research at Climate Outreach that helping audiences to understand what concepts such as adaptation mean is essential. Photography can help bring them to life, making them relatable and understandable. Our Climate Visuals evidence also shows us that images depicting climate solutions are well received by audiences. Pairing these with photographs of impacts can be an effective way to help audiences see their place, and a constructive future, in what might otherwise be quite overwhelming imagery that is difficult to relate to their own lives.

Despite the opportunity that constructive climate imagery brings, impact photographs still dominate the visual language of climate change. In many ways this is unsurprising – the scenes depicted are often visually striking and emotionally powerful, following a well-worn tradition of what makes for impactful photojournalism. In the face of a crisis where it’s difficult to comprehend scale, images of impacts represent instances of this crisis colliding with an everyday reality, functioning as a form of evidence or even proof. In comparison, images of measures to adapt to climate change are often technical, static and lacking in humanity. This makes them immediately less interesting and engaging, whilst also feeling more abstract and harder to relate to. 

This is not to say that images of climate impacts aren’t vitally important – they are. But limiting the visual depiction of climate change to its impacts misses an opportunity to engage audiences. The CCC report highlights the “opportunity to show that government can create change for the better”. Photography has a role to play here too. By revealing what this change looks like in real people’s lives, photographs can build comprehension and understanding and ground abstract terms in real-world experience. 

To achieve this, we need more of the right images, images of communities working on, and benefiting from, measures to adapt to our changing climate. We need to photograph a diversity of stories that highlight what this looks like in practice, and what’s possible. We need to highlight climate impacts, but not stop there, instead combining the urgency and emotion of these images with photographs that look forward – helping audiences to imagine a well-adapted future and their place in it. 

Our Climate Visuals library contains many images that do this, including a wide range that are freely available for non-profit, educational and editorial use. We can also help your organisation with photography commissioning, picture research and curation to help you to tell a more complete climate story with photography.