A technician makes adjustments to a wind turbine at the National Wind Technology Center in Boulder, Colorado. Technological climate solutions can lack emotion but revealing both the engineering scale, human endeavour and dramatic interactions between them will resonate with a broader audience.

Visualizing Climate Change: An open call for photography

Together, Climate Visuals and TED Countdown are releasing 100 photographs that showcase climate solutions alongside the global impact of climate change. The images were selected from more than 5,500 unique submissions from professional and amateur, gender balanced photographers - spanning more than 150 countries. The images will be freely available to key groups communicating on climate, namely the editorial media, educators, campaigns and non-for-profit groups, via the Climate Visuals library.  

“We’re so incredibly grateful, proud, and excited about the submissions received and embodied in our judge’s final selections”, said Toby Smith, Climate Visuals Programme Lead. “The images portray diverse climate solutions, new narratives and voices, and impactful photography—all direct from communities around the world. We reached over 5.2M individuals in our Open Call in June. However,  the real impact starts now as the entire collection becomes accessible to climate communicators.”

“Communication is one of the key pillars in the fight against climate change,” said Logan McClure Davda, Head of Impact at TED. “How we articulate the impact of climate can make or break public opinion, and the ripple effect is seen throughout culture, business, education, media, and more. Together with Fine Acts, we’re pleased to be able to provide climate communicators with free resources to illustrate both the global impact of climate change and the solutions that make us hopeful.”  

Thank you to the KR Foundation

We are incredibly grateful to the KR Foundation, which in 2019 and 2020 supported us to grow our reach and catalyse a new visual language for climate change.

In this period, our series of interventions, grants, awards, advice and accessible evidence reached over 500 million people and produced  over 400 pieces of unique media coverage via collaborative partnerships with Getty Images,  The Guardian,  Covering Climate Now and World Press Photo. Our activities and numerous consultations are based on evolving research, unique industry perspective and our library - all accessed by over 11,000 individuals monthly.

Seeking further support and partnerships

Climate Visuals is now actively seeking funding and additional support to take our work even further in scale and geography. New philanthropic, commercial and high-visibility partnership opportunities will increase this momentum of positive change within visual communications at large, and also empower complementary campaign groups and civil society –  an opportunity to change how we all see and act on climate change.  Our contact details are below.

Already confirmed for 2021, Climate Visuals is delivering three major projects with the Climate and Land Use Alliance, Natural England and TED Countdown.  These are all underpinned by this new and improved image library website (launched in April) and will conclude with plans for a physical and virtual exhibition at the COP26 UN climate conference in Glasgow at the end of the year.

Unique and trusted image library

In April 2021,  this  library was  relaunched on a bespoke Digital Asset Management system from Capture, providing the digital architecture to both meet our rapidly growing user demand and provide the entry and distribution portal of Climate Visuals Countdown.

The library is a trusted source of content for over 500 climate change and environmental groups (see table below), providing a balance between examples of premium Rights Managed and Creative Commons imagery.

Contact

Toby Smith - Climate Visuals Programme Lead and Media Liaison

toby.smith@climateoutreach.org