Over the summer, Europe provided a stark new set of images of climate change. Wildfires raced across forests and grasslands, rivers and reservoirs dried up in droughts and extreme heat disrupted everyday life.

Instead of the familiar photographs of people enjoying days at the beach, coverage of heatwaves increasingly comes with images of their consequences.

Moreover, issues such as drought and the knock-on challenges for water conservation and food security are not reserved for distant countries, but now the impacts are unmistakably at home on our own doorstep. Tragically, this has also resulted in the loss of life and property.

How these effects are depicted through images, like the photographs we have been seeing in the media, matter for how people think about and act around climate change. This raises questions regarding how climate fallout in the UK and Europe is visually communicated through images and what affects these images may have on their viewers.

Images are powerful tools

Images can be powerful communicative tools as they can be “read” more quickly than text and can sometimes be more emotionally........

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