Today it’s hard to do anything without considering the negative impact it has on the environment. Nearly everything we do is in some way a debit on the environmental balance sheet. The CO2 emissions of driving to work, the water used to make our clothes or the animals we (may) choose to eat. There’s no way around it – everything has an impact.
So for those conscious the only real option is to try and make choices that limit the impact rather than remove it entirely. Can you walk to work rather than drive? Take a train rather than a plane? Only eat meat once a week? All these changes, albeit very small, on the global scale can add up to make a difference.
The same logic should apply to scuba diving and underwater photography.
There has always been a deep seated connection between underwater photography and conservation. It’s an impactful and accessible means of communicating the challenges the world’s environment faces. Nearly every underwater photographic competition now has a category dedicated to conservation photography.
The 2023 finalists of the Ocean Photographer of the Year (OPY) have just been announced and there are some truly stunning images, particularly in their ‘Conservation (Hope)’ category. However, looking at the locations the picture were taken got me thinking: how much CO2 was produced in the efforts to get these pictures?
Really the fundamental question is: does the pursuit of award winning photographs damage the environment more than it protects it?
Instagram makes it easy to see all the exciting and exotic places many of these well known underwater photographers go to throughout the year. Many of them are travelling year-round.
It’s also relatively straightforward to estimate the emissions impact. Air travel makes up approximately 2.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions and a rough estimation of the emissions, per-seat per-hour, of a flight is around 90kg of CO2. So to get to somewhere like Raja Ampat in Indonesia (a favourite for photographers) from the UK is around 3 tonnes of CO2 per person.
Comparing this against the global average of CO2 emission, around 4 tonnes per person per year, you can easily gauge the size of the emission of a dive trip. There’s also a vicious cycle at play. As the condition of the marine environment deteriorates you now need to travel further, to more remote destinations, to see pristine reefs and rarer marine life.
I don’t know where all finalist are from but I can make an educated guess that they’re not residents of where at least some of the photos were taken (Antarctica or the Falkland Islands anyone!). So many of the images will have a significant CO2 bill. You also have to consider the hundreds of images that were entered but not selected as finalists. Maybe everyone is carbon offsetting their journeys but by all accounts it doesn’t actually work.
I’m sure the photos would have been taken regardless of this particular competition and it’s not responsible for the emissions directly. So without going full Extinction Rebellion is there a way the carbon footprint of an image could be considered when judging, particularly in a category with a message of conservation?
Final Thoughts
I haven’t mentioned the good the images can do – the OPY competition drew wide media attention here in the UK, appearing in a number of national newspapers. That’s a lot of eye looking at these powerful images. So I don’t want to underplay the impact they can have in driving change but it’s far harder to quantify the good they do rather than estimate the bad.
It’s easy to be critical. Professional underwater photographers need to work, get exposure and sell images to make a living. My day job has a carbon footprint, I travel internationally to dive and take photographs. I’m certainly not perfect and should do more. I’m sure everyone who entered deeply cares about protecting the oceans and marine life.
There’s a whiff of ‘do as I say not as I do’ but to me if we’re saying that about the conservation category of an ocean photography competition it just illustrates how challenging it will be to solve climate change.
