12 Powerful Winning Photos from the 2025 Earth Photo Awards Expose Climate Realities

Now in its eighth year, the Earth Photo Awards continue to spotlight the urgent challenges facing our planet through the power of photography and film. Created by Forestry England, the Royal Geographical Society, and Parker Harris, the awards honor visual storytellers whose work sheds light on how climate change is shaping the world around us. The 2025 edition brings together twelve powerful winning images that not only captivate the eye but also carry profound environmental messages.

Photo by: Mateo Borrero

Judged by experts in photography, geography, film, and environmental science, this year’s winners present a compelling look at rising sea levels, deforestation, drought-stricken lands, melting glaciers, and communities living on the front lines of ecological change. Each photo is both artistically stunning and scientifically grounded—offering viewers not just beauty, but also a sobering call to awareness and action.

From haunting aerial views of flooded coastlines to intimate portraits of displaced families, these images reveal the human and environmental cost of climate inaction. Together, they create a vivid narrative of a planet in flux—urging us to reflect, respond, and reconnect with the world we share. These 12 photographs are more than just award-winners—they are visual wake-up calls.

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#1. "Carcass of the Ice Beast" by Liam Man. The Royal Geographical Society – Climate of Change Award

"Carcass of the Ice Beast, Image 3 from The Icebreaker Project, is a photograph taken of the Rhone Glacier. In 2009, thermally reflective blankets were used to slow their melting, covering five acres to deflect infrared radiation. ‘Today, these coverings hang in tatters, like the torn skin of a dying giant”, Liam Man explains. By anthropomorphising the glacier, the photographer invites us to “bear witness to the cryosphere’s beauty and its vulnerability.’"

#2. "Autophagy" by Lorenzo Poli. Earth Photo Award 2025

"This impressive, black-and-white photograph was taken at the Chuquicamata mine in Chile, the second-largest open-pit copper mine in the world by excavated volume, and one of the deepest, plunging nearly 1,000 meters (3,300 feet) into the Earth. Capturing an abandoned miners’ town and cemetery gradually being subsumed by mineral ore extraction, the image documents the “gridded impermanence of extractive cycles, overpowering life and death,” according to Lorenzo Poli."

#3. "Beneath | Beofhód" series by Shane Hynan. Photoworks Digital Residency Award & Sidney Nolan Trust Residency Prize.

"An Irish term meaning “life beneath the sod’, Beneath | Beofhód, “evokes the deep-rooted reverence for the land in Celtic culture”, according to photographer Shane Hynan. Using a combination of “topographical mapping and metaphorical exploration”, Hynan’s project reflects on the legacy of industrial peat harvesting, and recent tensions between traditional turf cutting practices and the need to restore and protect fragile peatland ecosystems."

#4. "Rotary Screw Traps" by Vivian Wan. New Scientist Editors Award

"On the Trinity River in Willow Creek, California, Yurok Tribal members and biologists Oshun O’Rourk and Yadao Inong, along with technicians, install rotary screw traps: specialised devices used to catch live fi sh for annual disease monitoring and to track migration patterns. For centuries, the Klamath Basin has been the cultural and ecological heart of the Yurok Tribe, who identify as “Indians of the river and coast.” The basin’s waters have long sustained fishing, eel hunting, and above all, the sacred salmon—central to Yurok spirituality, identity, and livelihood."

#5. "Waterline" by Mateo Borrero. The Forestry England – Forest Ecosystem Award

"A Ticuna man stands on the side of a 500-year-old Ceiba tree in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest. The tree has a water line that marks where the water level reaches during the rainy season, which goes from April to May. This photograph was taken in May 2024, and by that time, the level should be at the maximum; however, the rains were scarce by then due to global warming."

#6. "La Hepica – Consumed Living Spaces" by Issam Corrib. David Wolf Kaye Future Potential Awards

"Issam Chorrib’s image taken in Larache, Morocco, captures a turning point where nature and human impact collide: a forest once used for leisure and reflection, now consumed by fire. Part of his series La Hepica: Consumed Living Spaces, “the image underscores the increasing fragility of ecosystems in the face of climate change”, Issam Chorrib explained. Prolonged droughts and environmental mismanagement have made places like La Hepica increasingly vulnerable to wildfire."