Marco Zorzanello

© Andrea Rosset N-B

It’s hard to understand that there still needs to be a debate. While the Hindu Kouch-Himalaya region, often known at the ’Third Pole’, is threatened by global warming, Alaska is recording unprecedented heat levels, and the underground Svalbard vault, located between Norway and the North Pole and acting as the world’s largest seed store, is feeling the initial effects of rising temperatures, some continue to deny this irreversible phenomenon.

But this is no new phenomenon. In as early as 1896, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius established a causal link between the combustion of fossil fuels and an increase in carbon dioxide levels – and how they warm up the air. There is one problem though: although our planet is currently in a natural phase of warming (such phases have always existed since the Earth’s creation), humans are speeding up the process and making it worse. In Mauna Loa, Hawaii, the concentration of carbon dioxide particles in the air has reached 411 parts per million. This is the highest level in 800,000 years.

Italian photographer Marco Zorzanello has opted to illustrate how some people are ironically using climate change as a holiday opportunity. The Dolomites ski domain in Italy, the River Jordan, the Dead Sea and Greenland all have one thing in common ! They are all destinations for ’climate tourism’. Although snow on the Italian mountains now only forms the narrowest of layers, the level of the salty inland sea spanning Israel and Jordan has reached an unprecedented low, and the ice cap is melting before our very eyes, tourists continue to flock to these regions transformed by climate change. The burlesque absurdity emanating from these photographs conceals a much more serious reality. That of naive human beings pretending they can’t see the evidence, so that they don’t need to change their lifestyles or bother taking action to avoid the disaster hurtling towards us. Marco Zorzanello won the Yves Rocher Foundation photography award in 2018, in partnership with Visa pour l’Image. He received an €8,000 bursary to fund the Greenland chapter of his opus.

In partnership with the Yves Rocher Foundation.