Environment 2nd Place

The Colorado River once stretched for more than 2,000km (1,200 miles) across the western United States, from the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of California. However, extensive agriculture, dams, huge canal systems and the diversion of water to growing cities in the desert have changed the river, which has been drying up and no longer reaches the delta. Today, more than 44 million people depend on the water of the Colorado, but less snowfall in the mountains has intensified the struggle for water rights, with farmers having to file for bankruptcy and hedge funds buying farms to get their water rights.

Jonas Kakó studies photojournalism and documentary photography at the University of Hannover. For several years he has been dealing with the effects of the climate crisis in his photographic work. For him, the pressing issue of our time, he focuses on individual fates of people who are already suffering from the consequences of global warming and are threatened in their existence. His freelance work has appeared in National Geographic, Stern, Vice, de Volkskrant and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, among othe