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From scientific tricks to stop turtle traffickers to stranded seals and displaced workers, these images all scooped prizes at this year’s Earth Photo awards
Every Crime Leaves a Trace by Britta Jaschinski … a green sea turtle with human handprint Photograph: Britta JaschinskiTue 14 Jul 2026 02.00 EDT
Tracking the Invisible by Britta Jaschinski (Earth Photo award 2026)
Britta Jaschinski’s project documents the illegal wildlife trade and the forensic science being developed to fight it. Using a newly developed magnetic powder, Mark Moseley, a forensic investigator at London’s metropolitan police, dusts for and detects human fingerprints on an elephant tusk confiscated at Heathrow airport. Shortlisted and award-winning works are on view in the Earth Photo 2026 exhibition at the Royal Geographical Society, London, until 24 July, with an interactive event Summit Photo running from 17-19 July
Every Crime Leaves a Trace by Britta Jaschinski (Earth Photo award 2026)
Can crime-scene techniques stop a $23bn (£17bn) poaching industry? But can you spot the human hand print on this green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas)? The image demonstrates a method for securing forensic evidence that can help to catch poachers and animal traffickers
Roots of Healing by Filbert Minja (David Wolf Kaye Future Potential award)
Filbert Minja’s documenting of Indigenous herbalists in the Kilimanjaro and Arusha regions of Tanzania won the prize for photographers under the age of 25
Roots of Healing by Filbert Minja (David Wolf Kaye Future Potential award)
Minja’s photographs approach herbalism not as something symbolic or mystical, but as a real, everyday practice rooted in environment and cultural tradition. Through portraits, quiet observation and landscape images, he asks what it looks like when knowledge is held in people, plants and land rather than in written records, honouring a form of healing passed between generations through touch, gesture and close attention to the natural world
Shifting Seasons by Natalya Saprunova (New Scientist Editors award)
Natalya Saprunova’s long-term project documents permafrost thaw and coastal erosion across the Inuvialuit territories of Canada’s Northwest Territories.The migration of geese and ducks to the Canadian north traditionally occurs during the annual spring ice thaw. This migration is crucial for the Inuit people, as the birds provide a vital subsistence food source, ensuring food for the entire year. Here, a local hunter stands on the tundra in an area of snowmelt, using decoy geese to lure the birds
Growing Threat to Marine Ecosystem by Natalya Saprunova (New Scientist Editors award)
The ringed seal rests on a sand spit on Banks Island, 15 miles from the Inuvialuit community of Sachs Harbour in the Canadian Arctic. Rapidly melting sea ice has left it stranded on the landward side. Thawing permafrost also releases sediment, which carries mercury, into the ocean. Traces of this toxic metal have been found in seal fat. These contaminants threaten marine life and disrupt the ocean’s chemistry and food chain. The health of humans who rely on marine animals for food is also at risk
Lives of Extraction by Payal Kakkar
(Royal Geographical Society Climate of Change award)This series documents the Khairwar Indigenous community of Majhauli Path, Singrauli, as they lead a resistance movement against coal mining and land dispossession in India’s so-called ‘energy capital’. Payal Kakkar uses a process of gum oil printing, collecting mining tailings and using them in the developing process itself, so that the stains of industrial contamination become part of the image. The prints are then hand-embroidered with green thread, evoking the community’s lost forests and farmland
Lives of Extraction by Payal Kakkar
(Royal Geographical Society Climate of Change award)Kakkar has embedded herself within the protest, photographing the women who have staged Gandhi-style sit-ins demanding fair compensation for land consumed by the ever-expanding Suliyari mine waste dump. In December 2025, several families, including those photographed, were forcibly relocated by mining company operatives supported by armed forces, without resettlement or rehabilitation plans
Quiulacocha by Marco Garro (Photoworks Digital Residency award)
Quiulacocha is a long-term investigation into the environmental and human cost of mining at Cerro de Pasco, Peru, one of the world’s most polluted places, situated at 4,300 metres above sea level in the Andes
Quiulacocha by Marco Garro (Photoworks Digital Residency award)
Marco Garro has documented this community for two decades. For this project, he collected samples of mining tailings from the former Lake Quiulacocha, now filled with toxic waste, and used them in the photographic development process. The resulting stains and textures echo the contamination that has entered the blood of local people, the soil and the water supply for generations
Drowning World by Gideon Mendel (Moving Image award)
Gideon Mendel was commended for his film work documenting communities around the world living through the consequences of flooding and climate displacement. Mendel began working as a photographer in South Africa during apartheid, and has since developed a long-term practice that sits between documentary, art and visual activism. His Drowning World series uses precise, often unsettling compositions to frame people within their flooded homes and landscapes, portraits in which subjects meet the camera with dignity and resilience
Here Now There Then by Zillah Bowes (Sidney Nolan Trust Residency prize)
Zillah Bowes is a Welsh/English multidisciplinary artist working across film, photography, poetry and installation. Here Now There Then is a two-channel film using analogue photographs animated by frame variation to explore traumatic memory and the healing effect of proximity to a riverPhotograph: Hugo Glendinning/Zillah Bowes
The Vanishing Childhood by Mohammad Rakibul Hasan (New Scientist Editors award)
This film follows Mohammad Saown, a teenage boy from the flood-prone haor wetlands of Kishoreganj, Bangladesh, whose family is forced to migrate to the brickfields of Narayanganj after intensifying monsoon floods destroy their farmland. Covered in dust and sweat, labourers in a Narayanganj brickfield balance stacks of bricks on their heads, their bodies bearing the weight of both labour and survival. These workers, many of whom migrated from flood-stricken wetland regions, endure grueling conditions to earn a livingExplore more on these topics
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