The first time Ashley Cooper saw a polar bear, the animal was lying dead. As he later learned, the bear had starved to death as a result of climate change.
“You don’t need a scientist to tell you climate change is happening; it’s visible all around us, everyone can see it, if they choose to look.”
Cooper, a professional photographer who has documented the effects of global warming for sixteen years, had booked an expedition to Svalbard, a Norwegian arctic archipelago, hoping to take pictures of polar bears in their natural habitat.
“One day, I spotted what I thought was a polar bear on land, but this thing didn’t appear to move at all, and I was obviously really keen to have a closer look at it,” Cooper says. “At that point, I had never even seen an alive polar bear before.”
Ashley Cooper
Ashley Cooper photographing wildlife
It was 2013, and it was the first time a polar bear was documented to have died as a direct result of climate change.
“It was just an absolute bag of skin and bones,” Cooper continues. “It was obvious even to an untrained eye like mine that this polar bear was highly malnourished.”
Polar bears feed almost exclusively on seals and need sea ice to capture their prey. As a polar bear expert who was on the same expedition explained, the most likely scenario was that the bear had starved to death because there was no sea ice to walk on while hunting for food.
The shocking pictures Cooper took that day in Svalbard were picked up by newspapers all over the world, and became a visual manifesto of the disastrous effects climate change is having on our planet.
“You don’t need a scientist to tell you climate change is happening; it’s visible all around us, everyone can see it, if they choose to look,” Cooper says.
Engaging people in the issue of climate change, however, can be difficult. Many people view it as abstract, distant, and impersonal—something that doesn’t really directly concern them.
A study published last month by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication revealed that sharing personal stories on the impacts of climate change, like Cooper’s, can be an extremely promising communication tool to engage diverse and even skeptical audiences.
Telling stories of people who have seen the effects of climate change with their own eyes has never been more crucial.
“Many people perceive the impacts of climate change to be far away in time and space,” the study notes, which is why “It is important to emphasize that climate change impacts are here and now, and already harming people and local ecosystems.”
To test this, researchers studied the persuasive effects of one radio story in two experiments. The story features Richard Mode, a North Carolina sportsman, who describes his emotional response to the impacts of climate change on his favorite places to hunt and fish.
This study’s findings support the theory that building identification through storytelling is an effective strategy in climate change communication and that “focusing on relatable characters and salient impacts may be met with higher perceptions of issue importance, threat salience, and threat severity.”
In other words, telling stories of people who have seen the effects of climate change with their own eyes has never been more crucial.
Cooper decided to tell those stories using pictures: With his beautiful and striking photos, he captures the effects of climate change on people’s personal lives, too.
In 2009, he documented the Black Saturday bushfires in the Australian state of Victoria, where 173 people died, and even more escaped with burn wounds. The fires were thought to be a direct result of the heat wave that hit Australia only a week before.
In 2004, Cooper began creating a dedicated picture library for climate change, which took him all over the world and into the homes of extreme weather victims.
“When you go to people’s houses,” Cooper explains, “and the water is still four feet up the wall, and they have lost everything, it gets overwhelming. You are going into people’s lives at a very low point in their personal experience, when they are really distressed, and it is quite shocking to see. I was seeing a lot of that on a regular basis.”
As the Yale study highlighted, in order to effectively communicate about global warming, it is extremely important to make it relatable, because “personally relevant stories can increase emotional engagement by reducing psychological distance.”
Ronald de Hommel
Rosamira Guillen and a cotton top tamarin.
Rosamira Guillen, executive director of Proyecto Tití, an organization dedicated to the protection and conservation of one of Colombia’s most endangered native primate species, the cotton-top tamarin, has found new ways to reduce psychological distance and make climate change relevant to her audience.
“It’s difficult to communicate about climate change and conservation because in the past, we haven’t been able to make these issues relevant to different audiences,” Guillen says. “If I’m talking to the farmers, I can’t just talk about this beautiful monkey my organization is trying to protect. They would say ‘so what?’ But when you talk about the fact that they need the forest, and the farmers also need the forest for their animals and crops, they are willing to change.”
The cotton-top tamarin is a tiny monkey with a shock of white hair, only found in the tropical dry forests of northwestern Colombia: their survival has been threatened by extensive deforestation, illegal pet trade, and, of course, climate change.
“The shift in climate patterns affects food availability and the reproduction of these monkeys,” Guillen explains. “We now know that fertility in the females is directly correlated to the amount of food they have, so any shift in climate would screw up their reproduction. The reduction of forest areas and the risk of fires, two aspects directly connected to climate change, put their habitat at serious risk.”
Proyecto Tití
Proyecto Tití farmers planting trees
When Guillen is talking to farmers, she stresses the importance of preserving the forest for their own benefit; when she is raising awareness among young children, she organizes puppet shows, aimed at representing the dangers of the illegal pet trade.
“You connect to each audience with a different language,” she says. “And it’s all true, but it needs to be relevant. You cannot have one same speech for everybody, because it doesn’t necessarily work.”
Guillen, who also received a National Geographic award for leadership in conservation, thinks it is important to proceed one step at a time when trying to shift climate change beliefs.
“The scale of what we are doing may seem small, but these are slow processes. Growing a forest, I mean. You can cut it in a day, but it takes fifteen years to grow it back to something that is useful for the planet,” she says. “When I go to the reserve, and I see this place that is safe, and it’s because of our work, it just makes me happy. It’s little, but it’s something, and it’s contributing to a better environment.”