From 2022 to 2024, The Climate Pledge and the National Geographic Society have supported 15 National Geographic Explorers to document the global climate crisis through visual storytelling, illuminating the world’s biggest challenges and identifying potential solutions to protect the planet and its most vulnerable communities. Among those communities: women and children, who are disproportionately affected by climate change events. 

American photojournalist Lynsey Addario, one of five Explorers in the 2023 cohort, has traveled to the Darién Gap, the Amazon, Mexico, and Afghanistan to capture how the lives and livelihoods of women are under threat, from flooding and extreme drought to forced migration in search of water and fertile land. We recently talked with Addario about her project, how conflict has overshadowed the challenges and consequences of climate change in places such as Afghanistan, and what happens when the water finally dries up. 

This interview has been edited for clarity.

The Climate Pledge: Tell us more about your project for the National Geographic Society and The Climate Pledge, and how you chose the regions you visited. 

Addario: I wanted to select places that I felt were undercovered where I could focus on the effects of climate on women and children. It's often said that climate adversely affects women and children more because they are the ones who stay behind while the men are out working. So the women have to go fetch water. Women are responsible for feeding and cleaning their children with clean water, which is obviously an issue when there's a drought. Afghanistan is one of the top 10 countries affected by climate change and it's not often talked about in that context, I guess because Afghanistan has been so rife with war and, of course, the return of the Taliban government. Its climate consequences have been overlooked.

The Climate Pledge: One of the images you took for this project shows a mother holding her 1-year-old daughter in her family’s water storage room. Could you tell us about the moments leading up to that and what you were hoping to capture when you took that photo? 

Addario: This is in Nimruz Province in western Afghanistan, where a series of villages are emptying out because the water is gone. That's a consequence of both climate change and a new dam. When I went to this village, I met with the village elder who told me about a family who had left in the middle of the night—he saw them that afternoon, and when he woke up the next morning, they had packed their things and left. Many of these families go into neighboring Iran to try to work as day laborers because when there's no water in a village, people can't harvest their crops, they can't feed their families, they have to then buy food from outside. The village leader was telling me these stories, and I asked about his family. He told me they were suffering. They had to walk a fair amount to collect water. I asked where they store their water, and they showed me this room and one of his daughters was there holding her child. It was sort of this beautiful moment where you have a mother and child and all of the water cans.

The Climate Pledge: Do you have a sense of how the climate crisis is changing the broader community where you were? 

Addario: The main effect is that it’s causing mass migration—people leaving villages across parts of Afghanistan that have been plagued with drought and also floods. When there's climate change, there's extreme weather, because once the soil erodes and the ground becomes very hard and there's no harvesting of crops, if there is a heavy rain, there tends to be flash flooding. Many of the longtime residents have left, many of them are going to cities, and they're changing their livelihoods from a traditional family that has lived off the land to trying to find their way as menial day laborers. It’s not only changing the number of people who live there, but how they survive.

The Climate Pledge: What commonalities have you witnessed across the countries you’ve visited for this project, and the lives of the women living there? 

Addario: When women are living in drought, they're unable to provide for their children. Many of the women are malnourished; they don't produce breast milk. They have a hard time feeding their children, and then, in turn, their children are malnourished as well. And once the child is malnourished, their immune system goes down. So you have this chain of events that’s linked by water. There's a hygiene problem. If you don't have running water—or access to clean water—it's harder to bathe and then you're more apt to get illnesses. About 40% of children under 5 in Afghanistan will have stunted growth because there's so much malnutrition. That's a combination of decades of war, of climate change, of poverty. But nothing exists in a vacuum—these things all feed into one another. 

I think when you talk about climate change alone, it's hard for people—it was hard for me to get my head around it. How do the effects of climate change manifest in daily life? And the fact is that everything contributes to how and where we live and certainly climate change impacts that.

The Climate Pledge: What have you seen that might surprise people?

Addario: When I was in Herat, in western Afghanistan, I was visiting camps for the displaced, and most of the people there were displaced because of drought. The community leader came up to me and said, “I have all of these fathers who are selling their daughters into marriage at 7, 8, 9 years old, because they have to feed their families.” Afghanistan has a tradition of child marriage that has in some regions been exacerbated by drought. Families have had to sell their land because they can't harvest and many have had to take loans. To pay off debt, many have turned to selling their daughters to feed the rest of their children. Most of the fathers I interviewed expressed heartbreak, shedding tears openly in front of me. “I just don’t know how else I can feed the rest of my family.”

The Climate Pledge: Have you seen anything that’s inspired you or left you feeling hopeful? 

Addario: I met a farmer in Jowzjan who took a loan to get a huge solar panel, and with that solar panel he was able to put in a bore well, and with that bore well, he's able to provide not only his own farm water, but also water to two neighboring villages. So he hands out water to other farmers and he's been able to sustain himself. There is ingenuity that comes with this sort of desperation and it was interesting to see how he's turned around this misfortune and been able to till his land. And he's changed crops. So he's gone from harvesting wheat to harvesting cotton because he now has a bore well, he has more water, and cotton gets more money. And he's also being very generous. I've seen a sense of community—people helping each other. 

The Climate Pledge: How has your background as a war photographer prepared you for the work that you’re doing for this project? 

Addario: My background has been extremely helpful. A lot of these places are very difficult to access. I've been working in Afghanistan for 25 years straight, so it's important to have context and to be able to put things in perspective. Also, for example, walking the Darién Gap—a lot of that is just surviving. Being able to walk over 100 miles through the jungle from Colombia to Panama takes a lot of the same tools as covering conflict: situational awareness, being prepared, being physically fit, being able to survive with very minimal accommodations. We slept in a hammock for the entire time we were there, we passed a lot of dead bodies on the way. People were really desperate. These are all things that I have seen before—I was sort of prepared for the worst. 

The Climate Pledge: Is there anything about this project that has left a mark—that will shape your work going forward, or shape you personally going forward? 

Addario: We need to consider climate change as one of the greater threats of our future, and I think it should be incorporated into many of our stories going forward. It's important for people to realize that this is happening. We're seeing extreme storms, extreme floods, extreme weather, extreme drought. We're seeing these patterns in places we have never before seen them, and it's important to just be aware that this is something important we need to cover. 

Read more about the 15 extraordinary explorers documenting the global climate crisis here, and find more of Addario’s work on her website.