'Places without postcards' highlights impact of climate change around the world

The Pacific atoll, Ducie Island, is a mere 4.6m at its highest point. One of the remotest locations on the globe, the nearest people live almost 300 miles away. Which is why, as sea levels rise, there will be no one here to witness it sink beneath the waves for the final time. Why should we mourn its passing? Because of the half a million Murphy’s petrels who breed here every year. And given they make up about 90% of the world’s population, the loss of Ducie Atoll will also likely spell extinction for this most tragic of seabirds.– Terry Dawson, Professor of Global Environmental Change

Here, in Tenkodogo, Burkina Faso, temperatures can reach 40 degrees C during the six-month dry season. Increased demand for water and less rainfall have led to real shortages, especially in the drylands away from the city where local people are totally dependent on small reservoirs for their very livelihoods – whether fishing, herding, or growing crops. These pressures on water and food, exacerbated by climate change, have real potential to increase poverty, and lead to conflict within and between countries in these extreme environments.– Mark Mulligan, Professor of Physical and Environmental Geography

Here in Seelampur almost 50,000 people, including young children, desperately stave off poverty selling the precious metals they’ve recovered from TVs, phones, laptops, and other discarded electronic devices - exposing themselves to highly toxic chemicals in the process. Apart from the awful and hazardous conditions, this graveyard for unwanted equipment is also a terrible monument to the carbon emissions tied to making, using, and then replacing our gadgets. Globally, e-waste will contribute the equivalent of 852 million metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2030.Probably worth remembering the next time you want to upgrade your mobile.– Gabrielle Samuel, Lecturer in Environmental Justice and Health

Ouad Naga is one of many small towns nestled in between the long, straight sand dune ridges of Mauritania’s Sahara Desert. The formation of these ridges is dictated by the prevailing winds that blow sand from the North-east to the South-west. However, by the end of the century, global warming is predicted to change the wind’s direction, leading to a re-sculpting of the dunes, which will bury and obliterate Ouad Naga and other similar settlements. If the region becomes uninhabitable, it will create more climate-change refugees.– Andreas Baas, Professor of Aeolian Geomorphology

As Cambodia gets hotter, a precarious situation for many will be increasingly made worse by the droughts, cyclones, floods, and waterborne diseases that come along with a changing climate. Along the Mekong delta, rice farming has already become more expensive, more unpredictable, and increasingly vulnerable to these challenges. Microfinancing, the small loans increasingly used to help farmers adapt to climate change have, in themselves, created even more problems. High and inflexible repayments have pushed some households to borrow and work more, restrict their diets, sell their assets, and even quit farming altogether. This is a cautionary tale of how it’s not just climate change - but our responses to it - that risk making the impacts more harmful.– Katherine Brickell, Professor of Urban Studies and Nithya Natarajan, Senior Lecturer in International Development

You could be forgiven for thinking that it’s too cold up here for glaciers to melt. But high above the clouds, the upper slopes of Everest may be one of the sunniest places on earth. At almost 9km above sea level, the Bishop Rock sits just a few metres below the summit. And on it rests the world’s highest weather station. The data that it – and others installed along Everest’s slopes - transmits are helping us learn about the impacts of climate change on this iconic and important peak. We’ve found that the vast stores of snow and ice up here might be closer to melting than we’d thought due to the heat from the sun. With each fraction of a degree that humans warm the climate, we risk glaciers shrinking further, and more of the Himalayas becoming ice free. That’s a huge gamble to make with what is also an important source of freshwater for hundreds of millions of people.– Benjamin Graves, PhD researcher in Environmental Geography

Cutting emissions is going to require new technologies. And many of these are manufactured using valuable minerals such as cobalt, copper and nickel. The ocean floor is a vast untapped reserve of such metals but recovering them is contentious and comes with the potential for serious ecological harm to our already distressed oceans. The President of Nauru, the world’s smallest island state, wants to do just that. Like many Pacific islands, Nauru is poor and highly vulnerable to climate-related hazards, such as droughts, coral bleaching, and shoreline erosion. You can understand why mining these metals could be seen as the answer to many of Nauru’s problems – it brings in jobs, valuable investment, and contributes to global emission cuts. But - and this is a question many world leaders are beginning to struggle with - is the price worth paying?– Rowan Gard, Lecturer in Human Geography and Sustainability

Jacobabad sits in the Indus River valley in Pakistan's southeast.A victim of geography, it endures the highest levels of humid heat anywhere on Earth. So hot, in fact, that on rare occasions, it tips over into conditions that are literally intolerable for humans. The air can be so hot and full of water that our bodies are unable to deal with it. Death would be inevitable from sustained exposure. So far, these conditions have been experienced for just a few hours, but our predictions show that will increase with further warming. Jacobabad risks becoming too hot to be habitable. The inevitable question is: what will its population do if it does?– Tom Matthew, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Geography

Opened in 2022, Expo City Dubai will host COP28. It will also be home to Expo Valley, the planned residential part of the new city - a high-tech vision of a car-free, sustainable city with multi-functional districts and green spaces, connected to the centre of Dubai by modern public transport. Prices for the first phase of villas and townhouses start at AED3.4m (£762,000) and include space for a maid’s room. Expo Valley is a serious response to contemporary notions of sustainable, climate-resilient city design, but it raises deep questions about who will have access to these safe and sustainable places, and what will become of the many who do not see themselves in this future.– Frans Berkhout, Professor of Environment, Society & Climate