Like a lot of the world, massive elements of Iran are dealing with a long-term drought disaster. Lake Urmia, in northwestern Iran, was as soon as the biggest saltwater lake in West Asia. It was a sanctuary for migratory and indigenous animals, and yearly a whole bunch of vacationers visited its shores. However, many years of drought, rising summer time temperatures that speed up evaporation, and growing water calls for from agriculture have shrunk the lake dramatically. Its water quantity fell from 30 billion cubic metres in 1999, to simply half a billion cubic metres in 2013, and as we speak it’s a barren salt marsh. Salt storms rising from its dry mattress pose well being hazards to surrounding areas, with greater than 14 million folks not directly impacted by this environmental disaster. Deserted villages and small cities now encompass the lake, as households have been compelled to go away their houses, livelihoods and cherished recollections behind. Lake Urmia stands as a silent witness to environmental neglect — a haunting reminder of what’s misplaced when nature’s stability is disrupted. (Photo: Hossein Sadri Nobarzad, Iran, Islamic Republic Of, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Environment, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) Shot in Chad, Senegal and Djibouti, this sequence explores the trials and tribulations of Africa’s Great Green Wall (GGW), one of the vital bold environmental tasks ever undertaken. The multibillion greenback initiative hopes to re-green an unlimited strip of land stretching throughout your complete continent, with a view to battle desertification and increase meals safety, amongst different issues. It has been beset by issues, although, and plenty of of its tasks have failed. Yet even within the face of daunting odds, native communities from Dakar to Djibouti are striving to maintain the dream alive. (Photo: Tommy Trenchard, United Kingdom, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Environment, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) Jinê Land: Where Women Keep the Earth Alive tells the story of girls shaping the ecological and social way forward for Rojava in northeast Syria. In a area that’s nonetheless recovering from warfare and fragmentation, ladies lead the battle for environmental restoration, sustainable agriculture, and neighborhood self-governance. Since 2012, Kurdish, Assyrian, Arab, and Armenian communities have self-organised underneath a mannequin impressed by democratic confederalism, integrating ladies’s liberation and ecology. Women handle colleges, cooperatives, well being centres, and native councils, guaranteeing their management in each social and ecological spheres. Villages akin to Jinwar embody this imaginative and prescient: female-led, sustainable, and resilient, providing an area for training, self-reliance and communal life. Through images, this mission captures the intersection of freedom, ecology, and neighborhood, revealing a radical social experiment the place ladies are each the stewards of the land and the architects of a brand new society. (Photo: Matteo Trevisan, Italy, Finalist, Professional Competition, Environment, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) In 2025, a storm struck Taiwan, inflicting extreme injury alongside its southwestern coast. Among the affected areas had been the offshore photo voltaic panels in Chiayi, which had been severely broken. This sequence paperwork the work wanted to wash up and get better the particles. (Photo: Yi-Hsuan Lin, Taiwan, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Environment, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) Another picture from the 2025 storm in Taiwan. (Photo: Yi-Hsuan Lin, Taiwan, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Environment, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) In Mexico, ladies are defending their lands in opposition to industrial tasks, deforestation, water crises and local weather change. In Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, defending territory additionally preserves cultural reminiscence, the place nature and id are one. Through collaborative inventive processes by which ladies are invited to work together with the pure factor with which they really feel most related, this mission fuses physique, gesture and panorama to create an immersive expertise that celebrates environmental defenders and evokes our sensory and emotional reference to the residing world. (Photo: Mahé Elipe, France, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Environment, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) Part of the mission capturing ladies in Mexico who’re defending their lands in opposition to industrial tasks, deforestation, water crises and local weather change. (Photo: Mahé Elipe, France, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Environment, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) Forests have lengthy been narrated as areas the place solely vegetation exists. Yet science and historical past reveal that they’ve at all times been cultural territories, inhabited and reshaped by a number of human and non-human teams over time. Notes on How to Build a Forest is a photographic mission developed in Ecuador, within the territories of Mache Chindul and Yunguilla — landscapes marked by layered histories of settlement and relationships with the forest. Through documentary and experimental images that features infrared, thermal, and pinhole strategies, in addition to neighborhood archives intervened with fungi, the photographer invitations us ‘to imagine how other organisms perceive the forest, and how the forest, in turn, observes us’. In dialogue with scientific information, the work constructs a polyphonic narrative that understands forests as plural, advanced, and cultural areas, increasing the methods by which conservation will be conceived. (Photo: Isadora Romero, Ecuador, Finalist, Professional Competition, Environment, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) Part of the Notes on How to Build a Forest photographic mission. (Photo: Isadora Romero, Ecuador, Finalist, Professional Competition, Environment, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) Beofhód — ‘life beneath the sod’ in Irish — evokes the primal significance of bogs in Celtic custom. The sequence examines the cultural and environmental facets of bogs in Ireland and contemplates themes of social and environmental justice, topographical mapping and the evolving notion of peatlands in an period of de-industrialisation. Although pressing ecological imperatives have ended large-scale peat extraction, they’ve additionally created rigidity with small-scale harvesting for home use, which nonetheless persists. Referencing Joseph Beuys’ assertion that bogs are ‘the liveliest elements in the European landscape’ and ‘preservers of ancient history,’ this work displays on the endangered standing of those habitats within the artist’s post-industrial environment. In this mission, bogs are used as ‘a metaphor for Ireland and the Irish psyche, and for local, human and personal exploration of a global issue.’ (Photo: Shane Hynan, Ireland, Finalist, Professional Competition, Environment, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) Another image in Shane Hynan’s Beofhód sequence, evoking the primal significance of bogs in Celtic custom. (Photo: Shane Hynan, Ireland, Finalist, Professional Competition, Environment, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) Once the lifeblood of Dhaka, the Buriganga River now flows as a poisonous artery via the capital of Bangladesh. Thousands of factories dump untreated chemical waste into its waters, whereas residents use the river as an open landfill. Years of air pollution have erased its wildlife, turning the river right into a black, foul-smelling stream. The photographer poses the query: ‘Does Bangladesh have time to reverse this collapse?’ (Photo: Borja Abargues, Spain, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Environment, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) Another picture of Dhaka’s Buriganga River. (Photo: Borja Abargues, Spain, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Environment, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) This documentary sequence, created within the Galápagos Islands, observes the delicate coexistence between Galápagos sea lions (Zalophus wollebaeki), an endangered species, and an city panorama formed by the regular rise of tourism. It follows a naturally territorial species because it navigates seashores, docks, and port streets — areas more and more shared with residents and guests. These photos don’t search spectacle however quite reveal a gradual lack of habitat and a rising uncertainty about how this coexistence can endure. The work invitations a slower gaze and a mirrored image on how we inhabit the islands, and on the collective accountability to guard a singular ecosystem underneath fixed stress. (Photo: Eduardo Valenzuela, Ecuador, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Environment, Sony World Photography Awards 2026) Another picture from Eduardo Valenzuela’s documentary sequence observing the delicate coexistence between Galápagos sea lions (Zalophus wollebaeki), an endangered species, and an city panorama formed by the regular rise of tourism. (Photo: Eduardo Valenzuela, Ecuador, Shortlist, Professional Competition, Environment, Sony World Photography Awards 2026)