Sayung subdistrict, Demak, Central Java, Indonesia. A resident slowly makes his way through the inundated streets of the village due to rising sea levels.

About Climate Visuals

Welcome to the Climate Visuals website and image library - a unique and trusted source of evidence and images for over 350 climate change and environmental groups, journalists, educators and businesses.  

Climate Visuals, a project by Climate Outreach, has had significant impact in catalysing a new visual language for climate change. We've run major projects on visualising climate change, representing indigenous people in images, and promoting diversity in outdoor photography. Climate Visuals images were prominently displayed at COP26 in Glasgow, and are widely used by outlets such as the Guardian.  We’re now seeking new funding and offering partnership opportunities to take our activities even further.

Based on international social research in Europe and the US, this unique resource offers seven core principles for effective visual communication, plus a library of images. Climate Visuals aims to strategically change the working practices of influential visual communicators across the world, to catalyse a new - more compelling and diverse - visual language for climate change.

Since our launch in 2016, our collection has grown to host over 1,000 Creative Commons and rights managed images - all content that embodies our evidence-based 7 Climate Visuals principles.   These guidelines and exemplary images help ensure photographers, commissioners and editors can find and select photography that goes beyond illustration towards positive impact.

Last year, we relaunched our image library to maximise user and search functionality, creating new digital architecture. All images are captioned with an explanation of how they fit with the seven Climate Visuals principles, and why they work. Each image is linked to its original source and many are available to license from third party sites or download for free under Creative Commons licenses for use in blogs, articles and campaigns.

After registration, library users can now see and access content that is ‘rights ready’ for their profile and needs - searching in combination by keywords, country, theme, causes, impacts, solutions, date, license type and source. Users can also save, download and collaborate on their image selections across multiple lightboxes and share selected images directly to social media.

Over the next year, we plan to grow the library substantially with new partnerships and contributors, whilst rolling out customised climate-change keywords and vocabulary. This strategy and search tool will make our content even more accessible but also enable us to target and support both emerging and urgent climate narratives with the best visual content. Our Climate Visuals research and reports can now be found on the main Climate Outreach website, freeing up the Climate Visuals news pages for accessible summaries and news from across visual media.