How melting ice changes one country’s way of life.  The centuries-old traditional lifestyle enjoyed by Greenland’s hunters is now under threat.  Albert Lukassen’s world is melting around him.  When this 64-year-old Inuit man was young, he could hunt by dogsled on the frozen Uummannaq Fjord, on the west coast of Greenland, until June.  This photo shows him there in April.  All the photographs for this story were taken on the fjord.

Many centuries ago, the Scottish Highlands were covered by the Great Caledonian Forest – a lost wilderness that provided a home to wolves, bears and lynxes.  The forest’s timber was long ago cleared for industry and agriculture.  The loss of predatory control, combined with sporting tradition, has allowed Scotland’s deer numbers to grow unchecked.  Today, their browsing of tree saplings limits natural forest regeneration.

In Alladale Wilderness Reserve, 23,000 acres in the Scottish Highlands are being ‘rewilded’.  Over one million native trees have been replanted, carbon sinks have been restored, and red squirrel and eagle numbers have soared.  One day, it may even be possible to reintroduce wolves.

To protect tree saplings, Neil and his team must cull high numbers of deer.  For now, their vision of self-regulating nature requires controversial human intervention.

Neil began work at Alladale at 16.  He will be in his sixties when the replanted saplings are as tall as the remaining trees of the old-growth forest.

Czerniakowskie Lake is a nature reserve close to Warsaw, in the Mokotów district.  It is a favorite place for Warsaw residents to go for cold bathing.  There are chimneys in the background.  They are the chimneys of the largest heat and power plant in Poland and the second largest plant in Europe.  With 3 heating blocks, 3 coal-fired steam boilers and a 100% biomass-fired K1 steam boiler, the plant heats 55% of Warsaw’s buildings, and provides enough electricity to power over 10 million 60-watt light bulbs.

The Black Mambas are an all-female anti-poaching unit who operate without weapons in Balule Nature Reserve, near Kruger National Park, in north-eastern South Africa.  Trained in anti-poaching and survival skills, the Mambas are taught how to identify and track humans and animals, how to blend in with their surroundings and how to avoid confrontations.  Their training is crucial, as the animals they track are wild, and poachers shoot to kill.

Their anti-poaching strategy includes ‘visual policing’ through daily foot patrols along the park’s boundaries at dawn and by vehicle at dusk, manning observation and listening posts stationed in critical areas such as known entry and exit points, and monitoring popular waterholes for signs of poisoning.  The Black Mambas also live in a series of compounds inside the reserve, giving them a constant presence in the park.

The Black Mambas have received the UN’s top environmental award, ‘Champions of the Earth’.  They act as role models in their own communities, where many of the poachers live.  As women and mothers, they command a kind of respect rarely given to the heavily armed, mostly male, anti-poaching units.

Although women have long been working alongside men in the mines of Bolivia, they are believed to bring bad luck.

They are also undervalued.  Because they are paid less than men, have a poor knowledge of mining work, are at risk of accidents if they work in the galleries, and are resented by the men, who feel that women should not work in the mines, most of them have chosen to leave the galleries and to engage in open-pit mining work, notably in the clearing of tailings.

Their plight is the product of a historical process of violence, colonization and displacement.

The plunder and exploitation of the mines of the Potosí mines in Bolivia began 476 years ago.  The Spanish name Cerro de Potosí, or Cerro Rico de Potosí, was given to a site whose original name in the Quechua language was Sumaj Orck’o (‘the beautiful hill’).  The name ‘beautiful hill’ can now only be used ironically.

The Potosí mines were and still remain an important mining center located on the Cerro Rico de Potosí. Cerro Rico, more than 4,500 meters high, is bordered by miles of mining tunnels.  During the European Age of Discovery, the ‘inexhaustible’ mines of Potosí gave Spain and its empire more silver than any other place in the world.  Its exploitation, which has continued into the 21st century, brought wealth and prosperity to Europe.  The mines were worked by the forced labour of the indigenous population.  Many of these forgotten slaves died to make Spain rich.

The city of Potosí still lives in the shadow of Cerro Rico. The exploitation of the mines continues to be the basis of the local economy.  Two centuries after gaining its independence from Spain, Bolivia has still failed to close the mine galleries.  Around 15,000 workers, some of them children, continue to work daily in the Bolivian mines, in very hard conditions.  They work more than 80 meters below ground level, where the temperature rises to 40°C.  The air they breathe is mixed with moisture, dust and particles of silver, sulfur and arsenic.  Most of the men and boys who work in these painful conditions have a life expectancy of only 45 years.  Even so, the work goes on in the bowels of the mountain.

The Potosi mines have been worked for half a millennium, and are some of the oldest mines in Latin America.  They can also be regarded as a massive, unhealed wound.  This wound was inflicted initially by the Spanish conquistadors, in the service of colonial exploitation, but has been allowed by successive governments to remain open to this day.

A total of 30 firefighting vehicles and over 230 firefighters are still on the scene.  Table Mountain National Park and WOF are also assisting.

A team of researchers pilot the marginal ice zone near the island of Svalbard (80 degrees north) during the depths of winter.  Here, the ice cover has thinned dramatically due to climate change, opening up waterways that were once frozen.  The loss of sea ice means that waters that were once shrouded for 4 to 6 months of the year are now exposed to light sources for the first time in human history.  The team has mounted an expedition to understand how these trace amounts of light may be radically altering the arctic marine ecosystem.

In 1904 the Australian artist Frederick McCubbin painted his triptych ‘The Pioneer’. McCubbin hired models and painted the work near Mount Macedon in the state of Victoria.  The triptych illustrated land owned by his friend, William Peter McGregor, the second chairman of the mining company BHP.

While McCubbin was always non-committal about the narrative within his work, ‘The Pioneer’ presents a romanticized image of its white subjects, who ruthlessly cleared the land so that it could be used for the mass cultivation of imported livestock.  The impact of the cloven hooves of these animals upon the newly cleared land fundamentally changed the composition of the soil.

Dedicated to the European ‘pioneers’ who settled Australia, the triptych overlooks the thousands of years of nurturing land management by the Aboriginal communities which they displaced.  It offers an unintentionally prophetic vision of the continuing Anglo dominance of Australian popular culture, the extractive nature of the country’s economy, and the terrible damage which is still being done to Australia's natural environment.

Close to the landfill which, from a distance, I’d mistaken for a mountain, the workers sorted, ground, cleaned, cut & recycled.  Hour after hour.  It was so very hot inside the sheds and lean-tos which were strung out along the long, dry, dusty road, between the motorway and the landfill, like beads on a necklace.  Reality blurred, and the air burned.  People produce 1.3 billion tons of rubbish each year, but only 9% of plastic rubbish is recycled, and the need to recycle will only become greater.  The human cost of this, particularly in the developing world, is very high.  People work very long hours in dangerous and often poisonous conditions.  It is crucial that we remember their humanity and dignity, and act accordingly.

A portrait of Amir, the owner of the Sinar Gallih fruit and coffee plantation.  Amir, who was 36 years old when this picture was taken, is a former illegal logger who reconverted to sustainable agroforestry practices and protects the forest against deforestation in the Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park, around is place of living.

I was 15 when I started my first job, as a miner.  Mining got easier and more enjoyable as I got older, and the money got better.  All the same, it was very hard work. The thing I enjoyed most about the job was the camaraderie, the friendship.  Everybody had to rely on each other.  The Opencast is a good thing, for work. There were a lot of people from Rhymney, you would be surprised how many were working up there. We did have dust on our windows, but we used to get £200 a year for the fishing club.  They built us that centre and an artificial rugby field in Dowlais. They did up the entire town hall in Merthyr, so that’s something.  Jobs are so important, because there is nothing here, no work.  It’s a very deprived area.

‘We are surrounded everywhere by water and we have nowhere to run to.  People are dying of hunger, and the floods are to blame.’

Nyakeak Rambon, 70, uses her stick for balance as she walks through the flood water around Wangchot Primary School, where she has taken refuge.  Night is falling and there is barely any room inside.  Nyakeak stretches her legs one more time before she goes back into bed down for the night.  She won't lose her spot if she stays in all night.

This image shows the last cricket game played at Ferrybridge C Power Station, West Yorkshire, before several of the cooling towers were demolished in 2019.  Britain intends to phase out all its remaining coal power stations by 2025.  While the demolition marks an important step forward in the implementation of a cleaner energy strategy, change of this kind has also brought significant cultural and economic loss to many industrial communities.  Local landscapes have been transformed, as these iconic structures become obsolete.