Peter
Schwartzstein

It was December, a time of the year when the Iraqi climate usually delivers cool, relatively clear skies. But on that particular day in 2017, as on so many others in recent years, the weather gods had very different plans in mind. As we left Baghdad, the air assumed a heavy, yellowish tint. An hour later, it was a dull orange—and blustery enough to season our food with a fine patina of sand when we sat down for lunch at a roadside canteen. Over the rest of the afternoon, and through this most unseasonable of sandstorms, visibility dropped to such a point that even our driver, a man who saw speed bumps as personal affronts, felt it wise to slow to a crawl.

I had come to these parts to report on the unpredictable conditions that farmers face, and here was a very topical, if intensely inconvenient, case in point. We couldn’t identify the turnoff to a few of the villages on our agenda. We couldn’t find an interviewee’s house. By the time we slunk back into the capital that evening, bringing much of the desert with us, it was probably just as well we’d missed our meetings with the stickler-for-appearances-officials I had painstakingly scheduled.

Climate change is replete with brutal ironies. To those must be added the ways in which climate is increasingly sabotaging journalists’ attempts to cover it. Places are being rendered inaccessible by extreme weather events. Gear is failing or breaking or simply proving unfit for purpose in tougher conditions. In this sometimes literal morass of mud and mind-boggling temperatures, this all-important story is getting harder to tell.

In discussions with a dozen journalists on four continents, I’ve heard frequent accounts of how climate stifles coverage. Nichole Sobecki has spent many years photographing climate crises, especially in East Africa, during which she’s run the full gamut of related health crises. She’s fainted on climate-related assignments in Djibouti and South Sudan, both of which now routinely post highs well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit for months on end—all at “the most inconvenient or embarrassing times,” she says. She has experienced dehydration, especially in places with insufficient clean water. As temperatures warm and other conditions change in ways favorable to the spread of disease, she and her colleagues risk illness when they venture into the geographically peripheral and politically neglected areas in which many of climate’s most severe fallouts are felt.

They also risk damage to their gear and, in the process, to their ability to do their jobs. Photographer Alexandra Rose Howland told me that the conditions connected to the wildfires that she covered in Greece, in the summer of 2024, made it almost impossible to work at times. She resorted to alternating between her two camera bodies, placing one in a cooler whenever its battery overheated; even so, there were periods when neither could function. These limitations, in her view, made it impossible to fully capture the horror of the scenes around her. “There’s nothing that can fully translate the chaos of being surrounded by eighty-foot flames into a picture,” she said. “But it’s even harder when the technology is just dying around you.”

Allison Joyce, a North Carolina–based photographer, told me she’s occasionally sat out covering the extreme weather events that have hit her state with greater frequency in recent years, for fear of destroying her cameras. “Sometimes you just don’t want to deal with the possibility of your gear getting wet and then being without it,” she said. Joyce also suspects that an editor nixed a story about last year’s Hurricane Helene, concerned that it would be too hard for her to call for help if needed in the remote and now cellphone-tower-free areas worst affected by flooding.

One Indian photographer I met told me he’s sworn off coverage of environmental phenomena ever since deadly Cyclone Sidr in 2007; the memory of bodies suspended high in trees haunted him for years. Another, Arko Datto, described frequent nightmares after years of documenting intensifying riverbank erosion near his native Kolkata. “It happened quite a few times that I went to sleep and dreamed of the land giving way under my feet,” he said. “On one occasion, I even ran out into the street from my home in the city, convinced that what had happened to so many of the people I had met—waking up to find your home disappearing—was happening to me.” Would-be interviewees are also sometimes more sensitive during or following disasters, understandably wary of sitting for portraits or giving quotes.

Climate change can sabotage storytelling in unexpected ways, too. In 2019, I was all set to travel to Ethiopia’s Somali Region to report on the intense drought in the area. Days before my flight, however, a very unseasonal downpour of the sort that climate change is making more likely saturated much of the area with its first rain in more than a year. The result was temporary relief for the locals—and an impossible challenge for my photographer colleague. We ended up not going, even though drought conditions soon returned, pushing the region even deeper into poverty.

Amid this rash of very unwanted challenges, journalists have had to get resourceful. Some coat their cameras with water-repellent tape when it’s too wet, and rig up makeshift protective covers from scarves and other clothes when it’s blindingly sunny. When possible, others have simply taken to working in cooler nighttime hours, periods that are also free of the hazy, poor-quality light that extreme heat often brings and that photographers generally disdain—a solution that can create serious safety concerns, especially for female photographers. The most common coping mechanism is just to spend more money. “I always bring more of everything,” said Magnum photographer Moises Saman. “You don’t want to be in a situation where you’re out in the field and something breaks and you can’t shoot. This is the only thing I can do. There are no shortcuts.”

In some ways, climate impacts may seem minuscule compared with the other ills facing journalism—just another set of financial and safety pressures for an industry already up to its eyeballs in them. But that is to discount the damage these troubles are having on public understanding. By complicating reporting at a time of shrinking budgets and corporate risk aversion, climate change itself is undermining efforts to capture the magnitude of what’s really happening, sabotaging effective storytelling in ways that diminish the urgent need for meaningful climate action.