From China to the Pacific to Yellowstone National Park, how climate change impacts people and nature – photographer’s graphic images
- The photo looks innocent – a child in China running across sand dunes. But desertification has made her family climate refugees.
- Pulitzer Prize winner Josh Haner’s images from around the world show the impact of climate change on people and nature
On the surface, the image – of a young girl running across sand dunes near her home in China’s Tengger Desert – looks like a snapshot of a carefree, happy child.
Sadly, the story behind the shot is very different. Families like those of three-year-old Liu Jiali are being forced to leave their homes as desertification spreads. In China, they are called “ecological migrants” and the government has relocated around 329,000 of them from lands ruined by climate change, industrialisation and other human activity.
The image, by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times photographer Josh Haner, is one of 20 that make up “New York Times: Carbon’s Casualties”, an exhibition at the recently opened HACC in K11 Atelier in Quarry Bay, Hong Kong, that focuses on climate refugees displaced by rising sea levels, flooding and drought. Haner also draws attention to the loss of nature and cultural monuments.
Presented by the K11 Art Foundation, it runs in parallel with “Disruptive Matter”, a collection of 12 creative projects on the subject of sustainable design. Both run until February 16.
“In China, thousands have had to leave their homes and move into these,” says Haner, pointing to an aerial shot of a hastily built resettlement centre, Miaomiao Lake Village, in the Ningxia Hui autonomous region that is now home to 7,000 people from the Muslim Hui ethnic minority.