Different vantage points have the power to give us new perspectives, and that’s certainly true of these extraordinary aerial images. Depicting everything from dried-up waterways and disappearing glaciers to burnt-down forests and cities shrouded in smog, these photographs show the devastation of the climate crisis all around the world.
Click through this gallery to see the devastating effects of the climate crisis on Planet Earth, in pictures taken from above...
Taken on 25 November 2024, this image shows the quaint town of Bradford-on-Avon in southwest England submerged by floodwaters after the River Avon burst its banks during Storm Bert. A multi-hazard storm system, Bert dropped relentless rainfall on parts of the UK – evidence of wetter winters that are set to become the norm as the planet warms.
Widespread weather warnings were put in place ahead of the storm hitting, but many areas were still surprised by the severity of the damage that followed. More than 700 properties flooded in Wales alone.
When almost a year’s worth of rain fell in a mere eight hours in parts of southern Spain in October 2024, it triggered the worst natural disaster in the country's history. More than 200 people died in Valencia, Castilla–La Mancha and Andalucía in catastrophic floods which scientists say were made much worse by climate change.
Dr Friederike Otto from Imperial College London explained how "explosive downpours" like the ones in Spain can be intensified by the Earth’s atmosphere holding more moisture due to fossil fuel warming. This image shows the town centre of Paiporta, Valencia in the aftermath of the floods.
Making landfall as a Category 3 storm, Hurricane Milton smashed into Florida in October 2024, carving a trail of devastation that left tens of people dead and millions without electricity. The combination of heavy rainfall, extreme winds, storm surges and tornadoes made Milton one of the most destructive storms in recent years. Pictured here is the stripped carcass of the Tampa Bay Rays' baseball field in St Petersburg in the aftermath of the hurricane.
In a report published in November by Climate Central, it was concluded that stronger hurricanes are a by-product of human-caused climate change. Wind speeds feed off the heightened temperature of the sea surface, boosting a hurricane’s destructive power.
Before Milton, there was Beryl – the first Atlantic hurricane of the 2024 season. Its reign of terror lasted several days in June and July as it tore through the Caribbean, impacting Jamaica (pictured), Barbados and Grenada, among other islands.
What made Beryl so remarkable was the speed at which it reached Category 5 status – according to the LA Times, no storm in the Atlantic has ever done so as early as Beryl did. As the Earth’s atmosphere continues to warm and heat our oceans, the rapid intensification of hurricanes, tropical cyclones and storms is becoming ever more likely.
Cyclone Remal hit southern Bangladesh in May 2024, and was the Bay of Bengal’s first natural disaster of the year. Over four million people were affected and at least 65 were killed in Bangladesh and neighbouring India, making Remal the most severe cyclonic storm to have struck the area in the past 13 years.
This aerial photo shows a string of damaged houses in the low-lying Patuakhali district of Bangladesh. It is well-documented that the frequency and severity of tropical cyclones have been worsening due to the warming oceans and rising sea levels caused by the climate crisis.
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The longest heatwave to ever scorch India lasted from mid-May 2024 well into June. It gripped parts of the north and west of the country, seeing the capital Delhi endure its highest-recorded temperature and making even the nights dangerously hot. The sweltering conditions were widely linked to the climate emergency, as were the record rains and flash flooding that followed.
This photo dated 24 May 2024 shows villagers waiting at a well in Shahapur to gather water in the oppressive heat. The heatwave exposed infrastructure inequalities in some areas of India, with megacities like Mumbai gulping enough water to leave impoverished rural communities gasping for supplies.
The Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, home to almost 11 million people, is no stranger to flooding. But from April into May 2024, parts of the state received up to half of the annual predicted rainfall in just 10 days, sparking flooding that was among the worst to ever hit the region.
Scientists have since said the disaster, which claimed 169 lives, was made at least twice as likely by the human burning of trees and fossil fuels. This aerial view shows the drowned tarmac at Salgado Filho International Airport in the state capital of Porto Alegre on 20 May.
In April 2024, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed the fourth global coral bleaching event on record – and the second to occur within the last decade. Caused by heat stress resulting from rising ocean temperatures, coral bleaching is becoming more frequent and severe in the face of the climate emergency.
It can impact economies, local livelihoods and food security for those who depend on reefs around the world. This image shows a field of bleached and dead coral around Lizard Island on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
After wreaking destruction across southeastern Europe in early September 2023, Storm Daniel crossed the Mediterranean and ballooned into a 'medicane' – a weather phenomenon similar to hurricanes and typhoons. Daniel then hammered Libya with torrential rains, hitting the port city of Derna hardest, where the contents of two burst dams washed away whole neighbourhoods and killed at least 11,000 people.
Scientists from the World Weather Attribution initiative say planet-warming pollution made the deadly rainfall up to 50 times more likely and 50% worse.
The planet-warming event El Niño returned with a vengeance in 2023. It contributed to countries such as the UK enduring some of their hottest months since records began, as well as spiking global temperatures so severely in July that the world saw its hottest week in the record-keeping era.
El Niño, hand-in-hand with humans’ negative impact on the climate, triggered a series of further runaway weather patterns, like heatwaves, flooding and drought, as well as ecosystem damage. Pictured here in June 2023 are the extremely low water levels of Woodhead Reservoir, on the edge of England’s Peak District National Park.
Unprecedented wildfires incinerated huge swathes of Canada during the first half of 2023, affecting several provinces and belching smoke into the air which reached as far as the European continent. In what turned out to be the country’s most devastating wildfire season on record, 3,056 blazes burned between January and June, scorching around 20 million acres of land.
While each wildfire cannot be directly linked to the climate crisis, hotter and drier conditions caused by the warming of the planet have made Canada’s forests into tinder boxes. In this chilling image, fires can be seen sweeping across the northwest region of British Columbia.
An icon of the state of Utah that gives state capital Salt Lake City its name, this enormous saline lake is much saltier than the ocean and is so buoyant that swimmers can easily float. A crucial habitat for mammals and migratory birds, climate change-fuelled drought and local water usage have caused the lake to recede at an alarming rate.
The Great Salt Lake reached its lowest volume ever recorded in November 2022, at just 4,188 feet (1,277m). These satellite images, released by the European Space Agency, show the lake in 1985 (L) and in 2022 (R), having lost almost half its surface area.
Technically a reservoir rather than a natural lake, Lake Mead is the body of water contained by the Hoover Dam, created in 1935 to supply water to the American West. Yet the reservoir, which straddles the Arizona-Nevada border, reached dangerously low levels in summer 2022.
A combination of drought, plus higher rates of evaporation due to warming temperatures, led Lake Mead to reach a lowly 1,044 feet (318m) above sea level in June. This put immense stress on the water supply and the electricity supply, given that water must run through the dam in order to produce hydropower.
Notice the greenish swirls on the surface of this lake? While they might look pretty, they’re actually the sign of a serious ecological problem.
The bright green toxic algae that appears seasonally in Florida’s Lake Okeechobee comes from fertilisers from nearby farms, and has multiplied due to warmer temperatures, intense sunlight and more frequent rainfall. The problem is only set to worsen in coming years due to climate change.
Permafrost – constantly frozen soil, rock and sediment – is found beneath almost 85% of the land in Alaska. But with the dual threat of warming temperatures and increased rainfall, the stuff is melting fast, causing some Alaskan villages to relocate. In the Yupik Eskimo village of Quinhagak, seen here from the skies, large chunks of land have been eroded by the Kanektok River on one side, while the sea is claiming land on the other.
The far-flung Alaskan village of Kivalina sits on a thin strip of land, bordered on one side by the Kivalina Lagoon and on the other by the Chukchi Sea. Yet as the Arctic warms at twice the rate of the global average, causing the ice sheet to melt and sea levels to rise, the Inupiat village is being eroded on all sides. In fact, it could be underwater in a matter of years.
Eight to nine times saltier than the ocean, the Dead Sea is notoriously one of the most saline places on Earth. In fact, the salt content is so high you can almost sit on its surface.
But for the past few decades, the sea's water level has been dropping by more than three feet (1m) a year, caused partly by a lack of rainfall, which has fallen by around 10% in the region since 1950. In response, it's becoming saltier, sinkholes are forming in their thousands and salt formations like these are appearing on its surface.
With rain falling on the Greenland ice sheet for the first time in history in August 2021, the sheet had two significant 'melt events' that summer. Seasonal melting is a normal occurrence, but in 2021 it was especially severe: on 28 June, 340,000 square miles (881,000sq km) of the ice sheet broke off, becoming the seventh-largest melt event in history at the time.
Meanwhile 336,681 square miles (872,000sq km) melted on 14 August. Pictured is the town of Ilulissat, where chunks of broken ice could be seen floating around boats in the harbour.
Scenes like this became widespread after Russia was hit by its worst fire season in modern history in summer 2021. While wildfires are a natural occurrence each year, the blazes which ripped across the country from June destroyed more than 18.16 million hectares of forest and released a whopping 970 megatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere.
Smoke from the Siberian wildfires even reached the North Pole for the first time ever, according to NASA.
In August 2021, California’s second-largest reservoir, Lake Oroville, reached such low levels that the hydroelectric power plant had to be shut for the first time in its history.
Dismal scenes such as this became commonplace after the state suffered its driest year in a century and Lake Oroville reached a low point of 643.5 feet (196.1m) above sea level, its lowest since 1977. In stark contrast, the reservoir filled to full capacity in 2023 after a period of historic rain and snowmelt.
California experienced its driest year in a century between 1 October 2020 and 30 September 2021. In the Kern Valley, this led to the shrinking of Lake Isabella, which received just a fraction of the seasonal snowmelt it would usually have in spring. In October 2021, officials announced they were considering restrictions on activities like car-washing, watering lawns and offering water in restaurants to attempt to combat the drought.
Seen from the skies in March 2021, you can see how cracked and barren the surface of Suesca Lagoon looks after a year of very little rainfall. Dried-up riverbeds like this could become a more common sight due to climate change, especially in drier regions which are more sensitive to changes in rainfall.
Skies turned bright red over Algeria in February 2021 as a result of an intense sandstorm. The sand was kicked up from the Sahara Desert by strong winds, before travelling into Algeria and then north into European mountain ranges, including the Pyrenees and Alps. Although sandstorms are a natural occurrence, dry conditions caused by climate change are making them more frequent and intense.
Shocking aerial images captured in January 2021 show just how badly the coastal village of Happisburgh has been hit by erosion. This area of the Norfolk coastline loses on average seven feet (2m) of land to the sea each year, and the heavy rainfall of the 2020-2021 winter caused huge chunks of the cliff to fall off.
Yet, while flooding can be controlled, it’s harder to turn the tide on erosion. In the UK, sea levels have risen by six inches (15cm) since 1900, but sea level rise could reach four feet (1.12m) globally by 2100 if nothing is done to curb emissions.
Then and now: the alarming effects of coastal erosion in the UK
In 2020, Pakistan’s capital was ranked the most polluted city in the world by the US Air Quality Index. Air pollution is usually at its worst in Lahore in winter (October-February), when farmers burn their crops and the smoke becomes trapped by pollutants in the air.
Other contributors to pollution include smoke from brick kilns, dust from building sites and the large-scale loss of tree cover, which means less carbon is being absorbed. Shown here in October 2021, you can see how poor the visibility is due to the thick cloak of smog covering the city.
In the Paraná River delta region of Argentina, terrifying fires scorched wetlands in the summer of 2020. With their carbon-rich soils, exposed by lower water levels in the river and made extremely dry by lack of rainfall, these areas have the perfect conditions for fire to spread quickly. According to government data, almost 20,000 hectares of wetlands were burnt.
In this shocking aerial image, houses in the city of Jiujiang are completely surrounded by water following severe flooding in July 2020. Located on the banks of the Yangtze River, the settlement was one of many victims of that year’s flooding, which affected 63 million people and was thought to have killed more than 200.
According to climate scientists, rainstorms will become more frequent and intense due to climate change, so floods are set to become even more severe in the future.
The glaciers on the Svalbard archipelago, located between Norway and the North Pole, are some of the most northerly on the planet. But they’re also some of the most vulnerable to climate change, according to research published in the journal Nature Communications, thanks to their lower elevations and domed shapes.
In this photograph, taken by a drone, meltwater winds a channel through the ice during an unseasonably warm summer in 2021.
Northern Germany’s Harz mountains are usually cloaked in verdant green come summer, or a pristine white covering of snowfall in winter. But one colour they’re not supposed to be is parched brown – a result of unusually dry conditions, warm temperatures and insect infestations, which are becoming increasingly severe each summer.
In 2020, when this photograph was taken, more trees died than ever before in Germany, while just one in five had an intact canopy (a sign of a healthy tree).
The country of Tuvalu is situated on a narrow coral atoll in the Pacific Ocean, with no part of the island being more than 15 feet (4.5m) above sea level. This makes it extremely vulnerable to sea level rise. Pictured here in November 2019, the island nation, which covers 10 square miles (26sq km) and is home to around 11,000 people, is predicted to become uninhabitable within 50-100 years.
The usually lush green pine trees of Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest in southwest Montana have turned ghostly grey in recent years, as this image from September 2019 shows. And there’s an unexpected culprit behind the mass die-off.
As winters have become milder due to climate change, mountain pine beetle numbers have ballooned, and the insects have ravaged forests across western America. On top of that, drought has weakened the trees, making them more vulnerable to insect invasion.
The largest reservoir supplying water to Chennai, one of India’s biggest cities, almost completely dried up in June 2019. Lake Puzhal, along with the city’s three other major reservoirs, were hit by water shortages caused by a delay in the onset of the monsoon season. This left poorer residents dependent on drinking unsafe water collected from makeshift wells, while richer people were able to have water imported from nearby provinces.
The frequency of heatwaves in India is also on the rise; a study published by the University of Cambridge in April 2023 said "Indian heatwaves could cross the survivability limit for a healthy human resting in the shade by 2050."
Can you make out the tiny white specks in this picture? They’re actually sheep, and although the land they’re grazing on looks green, it’s surrounded by a barren sand and gravel-covered surface.
That’s because the nearby Breiðamerkurjökull glacier is retreating due to a warming climate, with ice calving (the loss of chunks of ice) increasing rapidly in recent years. Between 2000 and 2019, Iceland lost 290 square miles (750sq km) of glaciers.
Few could forget the devastating fires that ripped across the Amazon rainforest in 2019. In August that year, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) reported that there were more than 80,000 fires across the country, almost an 80% increase on the same period of the previous year.
The dry conditions which helped the fires to spread were linked to warming in the North Atlantic Ocean, which was drawing away moisture from the continent.
In late September 2018, the Malian capital, Bamako, and surrounding areas were flooded following heavy rain. Regions lying on the banks of the Niger River, such as the village of Bozo (pictured) were worst affected. Severe floods hit the region again just eight months later, killing 15 people and affecting around 300 households.
Climate change is causing rainy seasons to be more severe and unpredictable, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross’ Lemba Bisimwa, who oversees the organisation’s work in Mali.
The mighty Mount Kilimanjaro is Africa’s highest peak at 19,340 feet (5,895m). Yet the glaciers which once covered it are shrinking fast – so fast, in fact, that renowned ice climber Will Gadd had to cancel his plans for scaling them because the Messner route he’d planned to take was rendered impassable.
Pictured here from the skies in 2018, the Furtwängler Glacier lost an enormous 70% of its mass between 2014 and 2020, so that only thin walls of ice remain.
In 2018, Skopje received an unwelcome accolade: it was named Europe’s most polluted capital city. The North Macedonian capital, shown here from Vodno Mountain in 2017, is often shrouded in a stinky smog, with levels of the harmful pollutant PM10 exceeding EU limits for 202 days a year. It’s even thought that dirty air could be responsible for 4,000 premature deaths annually in North Macedonia.
Chile was engulfed by devastating wildfires in January 2017, leaving swathes of desolate-looking forests such as this one in La Florida. The fires began on the hillsides of Valparaíso, just after New Year, before sweeping across the south, burning a total area the size of Delaware.
According to members of the fire brigade, poor preparation for climate change and monocultures (large areas of the same crop) worsened their impact.
In 2016, one of the strongest El Niño events ever recorded led to a severe drought in Ethiopia, meaning that almost 18 million people had to receive emergency aid. In 2017, when the country was still struggling with the impact, it was devastated by a further brutal drought. Pictured here are cows, which have been grouped together to receive food provided by the Ethiopian government.
Nicknamed 'the day it rained forever', on 20 July 2007 two months' worth of rain fell in just 14 hours in Gloucestershire, southern England. The extensive flooding brought total havoc to the region: 5,000 buildings were damaged, 135,000 homes were without drinking water for up to 17 days and damages cost an estimated £50 million ($69.1m).
Pictured here is a small hamlet that was badly affected by the flooding, which is set to become more frequent and more intense due to climate change.
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