Earth Photo 2024: Amazing photos tell stories about our planet
- Published
Photographers from around the world have entered a contest and exhibition for images that tell important stories about our planet. We start here in South Korea where Elrea Song took this picture at a beach litter pick where children helped clean up the waste washed up from all around the world.
The Earth Photo 2024 Contest aims to to draw attention to the challenges facing the natural world. Here you can see these elephants in Ampara, Sri Lanka, are searching for food in a rubbish dump as human development has intruded so far into their natural habitat, which can also lead to conflict.
One of the younger entrants on the shortlist is 14-year-old Raymond Zhang. He's from Shanghai, China, and says he enjoys taking pictures when he goes on trips with his parents. He took this one showing rice terraces in southern China, which he says reminded him of a painter's colour palette.
To South Africa next and the Kogelberg Biosphere Reserve near Cape Town. Eric Nathan's photo shows amazing bio-luminescence, where algae in the ocean lights up as it moves in the surf.
Here you can see the same area of Kogel Bay, but this time Eric shows how wildfires in the nearby mountains can make the same scene appear very different.
Next to a story of conservation and to a coral farm in Florida where scientist Roxane Boonstra studies some healthy elkhorn coral at the world’s largest underwater coral nursery, the Coral Restoration Foundation. Warming ocean waters cause mass coral bleaching where wild coral is damaged and loses its colour. This project aims to protect it for the future.
Next to this epic tree, thought to be more than 1,000 years old. It's a cedar and part of an old growth forest in British Columbia, Canada. Indigenous people have fought and won the rights to preserve this land and allow these forest to keep growing.
The show organisers include the Royal Geographical Society and Forestry England who want to raise awareness of the Earth's beauty and also how fragile it can be. Among the photos is this one by Mark Adams of an English oak tree in the Forest of Dean, believed to be one of the last oaks planted in the 1700s for shipbuilding. The photo exhibition will tour around Forestry England sites, starting in June 2024.