Scenes from a warming world:
In Germany, a train passes a railroad crossing surrounded by floodwaters. In one of India’s poorest states — and one of its most vulnerable to climate change — a man climbs a ridge with a scavenged basket of coal against a color-drenched backdrop. In California, a dreamlike tableau unfolds as a man climbs a giant sequoia in an effort to preserve sequoia DNA in the face of encroaching wildfires.
In Greece, a man stands off a beach, his legs submerged, and watches a wildfire burn across the water. And in Colombia, a landscape of cracked mud to the horizon evokes a sci-fi world in a far-off galaxy even as it tells the story of a drying lagoon parched by climate change right here on Earth.
As the world’s climate changes, AP photographers challenged themselves in 2021 to chronicle it in visual ways that will make an impact and get people thinking. Apart, these images do that. Together, they represent a scrapbook of a planet hurtling toward a destiny that, some say, it is simply unwilling to prevent.
