Single images by: Stanley Greene and Fancesco Zizola.

Nine of the world’s best photographers have traveled around the world and documented the effects of climate change. Photo blog brings the climate summit these image series. Today we bring Francesco Zizolas series from Maldives. E-group has been widely reported recently, experts predict that sea levels will rise and force the island residents to emigrate. This within the next 15 years.” From Information newspaper.

View more images from Francesco Zizola and the Maldiveshere.

View more images from Yuri Kozyrev’s story on the Nenet Indianshere.

Spectrum: a 12-page feature showcasing the best in contemporary photography from around the world: the finest images, the best visual stories and the most cutting-edge photojournalism. Witty, moving, provocative – a window into our life and times, exclusively in The Sunday Times Magazine every week.

Russian Reporter features Consequences by NOOR.

“In Russia, global warming is difficult to treat seriously. The problems of Vanuatu and Tuvalu, which are a result of melting icebergs will simply leave under the water, simple Russians do not proymesh. It is also difficult to assume that the inhabitants of, say, Norilsk frighten weakening of frost on three or four degrees. Russia’s scientists also can not boast of unanimity: some are predicting even more climatic harm than cautious in their projections of the western colleagues. Others say that people here in general at anything. Warming – a phenomenon natural and inevitable: the end of the Little Ice Age, in which we all live.”

View the article here.

Karabash One of the most polluted cities in the world, Karabash in the Chelyabinskaya region of the southern Ural Mountains in Russia, is burdened with the dirty legacy of copper mining, chemical and heavy metal emissions and radiation leaks. The smokestack of the Karabash Copper Smelting Works has been spewing a thick soup of toxic fumes and metal particulates into the air for almost a century. Closed in 1987 when Soviet officials proclaimed it an “environmental disaster zone,” the plant was reopened 11 years later because the region needed jobs.

Black heaps of industrial waste tower 45 feet high around homes and apartments. Recently, the new owner of the smelter, the Russian Copper Company, has modernized the plant and installed filters to greatly reduce plant emissions. But for the residents of Karabash, the contamination of the past remains ever present. The Yamal Peninsula In the language of the indigenous Nenet, “Yamal” means “world’s end.” This 435-mile long peninsula in northwestern Siberia is home to both 42,000 Nenet and the largest natural gas reserve in the world. For a thousand years, the Nenet have herded their domesticated reindeer to summer pastures above the Arctic Circle.

But now, the Nenet’s traditional way of life is threatened by warming temperatures that turn the tundra into a boggy swamp and by the world’s rapacious appetite for natural gas. With the gas wells have come railroad tracks and natural gas pipelines that bisect herding routes and cause reindeers to break legs. Fish, once an abundant dietary staple, also have diminished; the Nenet blame offshore drilling. The Ob River, which the Nenet must cross to return to their southern pastures, freezes later than ever before, forcing reindeer to forage longer in depleted winter pastures.

©2009 Yuri Kozyrev/NOOR for Russian Reporter

Yamal peninsula, north-west Siberia, Russia: The camp of the nomadic Nenet tribes of the Yamal peninsula in Siberia.

For 1,000 years the indigenous Nenets people have migrated along the Yamal peninsula. In summer they wander northwards, taking their reindeer with them, across a landscape of boggy ponds, rhododendron-like shrubs and wind-blasted birch trees. In winter they return southwards.

But this remote region of north-west Siberia is now under heavy threat from global warming. Traditionally the Nenets travel across the frozen Ob River in November and set up camp in the southern forests around Nadym. These days, though, this annual winter pilgrimage is delayed. Last year the Nenets, together with many thousands of reindeer, had to wait until late December when the ice was finally thick enough to cross.

Text from: “Climate change in Russia’s Arctic tundra: ‘Our reindeer go hungry. There isn’t enough pasture’ ” by Luke Harding, published in the Guardian, Oct. 22, 2009.

©2009 Yuri Kozyrev/NOOR for Russian Reporter

Karabash and the Yamal Peninsula

Karabash

One of the most polluted cities in the world, Karabash in the Chelyabinskaya region of the southern Ural Mountains in Russia, is burdened with the dirty legacy of copper mining, chemical and heavy metal emissions and radiation leaks. The smokestack of the Karabash Copper Smelting Works has been spewing a thick soup of toxic fumes and metal particulates into the air for almost a century. Closed in 1990 when Soviet officials proclaimed it an “environmental disaster zone,” the plant was reopened eight years later because the region needed jobs. Black heaps of industrial waste tower 45 feet high around homes and apartments. Recently, the new owner of the smelter, the Russian Copper Company, has modernized the plant and installed filters to greatly reduce plant emissions. But for the residents of Karabash, the contamination of the past remains ever present.

The Yamal Peninsula

In the language of the indigenous Nenet, “Yamal” means “world’s end.” This 435-mile long peninsula in northwestern Siberia is home to both 42,000 Nenet and the largest natural gas reserve in the world. For a thousand years, the Nenet have herded their domesticated reindeer to summer pastures above the Arctic Circle. But now, the Nenet’s traditional way of life is threatened by warming temperatures that turn the tundra into a boggy swamp and by the world’s rapacious appetite for natural gas. With the gas wells have come railroad tracks and natural gas pipelines that bisect herding routes and cause reindeers to break legs. Fish, a once abundant dietary staple, also have diminished; the Nenet blame offshore drilling. The Ob River, which the Nenet must cross to return to their southern pastures, freezes later than ever before, stranding reindeer in depleted winter pastures.

About Yuri Kozyrev:

Russia, 1963 – A native of Russia, Yuri has covered every major conflict in the former Soviet Union – including two Chechen wars – since becoming a professional photojournalist twenty years ago. Immediately after September 11, 2001, he was on the scene in Afghanistan, where he documented the fall of the Taliban. He has spent much of the past six years in Baghdad, working for Time magazine. Yuri has received numerous honors for his photography, including four World Press Photo awards and the OPC Oliver Rebbot Award in 2004. In 2006, he was the recipient of the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award for photojournalism. Yuri is based in Moscow.