7 stunning photos at the intersection of climate, science and health
On Thursday, the competition from Wellcome Trust - a UK-based charitable foundation focused on health research - revealed its top 25 photos, ahead of the winners being announced next month.
The pictures are deeply evocative, capturing thousands of words' worth of emotion and information about pressing global issues. The health impacts of climate change emerge as a major theme, as well as the resilience and creativity with which people are responding.
After the awards ceremony on 16 July, all 25 photos will be free to view at an exhibition at the Francis Crick Institute in London, running from 17 July until 18 October 2025.
We have written many thousands of words about air pollution, climate migration, microplastics, water crises, and eco-innovations at Euronews Green over the years. But the seven photos below render these subjects in stunning and unfamiliar detail.
This aerial picture is of the former village of Geamăna in the Lupșa area in Transylvania, Romania.
In 1977, the Romanian president, Nicolae Ceaușescu, ordered the evacuation of the village's 1,000 inhabitants to clear the way for the creation of a large lake for the storage of toxic waste from the nearby Roșia Poieni copper mines.
Residents were promised they would be remunerated and relocated nearby, but were in fact moved hundreds of miles away and did not receive adequate support.
Romanian photographer Alexandru Radu Poposecu created this image to highlight how the beauty of the lake, known as the 'Geamăna environmental disaster', is at odds with its toxicity.
The lake continues to grow by about 100cm a year, and affects the quality of the local groundwater.
This image captures a group of local people collecting water from a riverbed in Purulia, a district in West Bengal, India.
Due to climate change, the monsoon season in the Indian subcontinent is becoming more irregular, causing rivers to dry out. During the dry season, many villages in this area regularly run out of drinking water, and only minimal amounts can be collected from the riverbed.
Indian photographer Sandipani Chattopadhyay seeks to draw attention to the stark reality of the water crisis and the growing threat to human existence.
Nuraine and her mother live in the city of Dhaka in Bangladesh. Nuraine wanted to have the experience of eating a picnic outside in nature, but due to rapid urbanisation, there are very few parks or green spaces left.
So her mother decided to recreate a 'nature experience' on the roof of their apartment building.
One of the main reasons people are moving into cities is because of the increase in extreme weather events and natural disasters, particularly affecting Bangladesh.
Every day, 2,000 climate migrants take up permanent residence in Dhaka, and they now comprise close to half of the total population. This is causing infrastructure challenges for the city.
Mithail Afrige Chowdhury, a local photographer, draws our attention to this tender scene and contrasts it with the reality of urban expansion visible around them.
Following the 'Striking Solo Photography' shortlisted pictures above, this remarkable photo has prevailed in 'The Marvels of Scientific and Medical Imaging' category.
It is the first successful non-invasive image of its kind, which shows the presence of plastic particles – visible in turquoise – deep inside a live mouse.
Patrick and Ogunlade, UK-based biomedical researchers, developed a photoacoustic imaging method using lasers and the resulting sound waves they generate when interacting with a sample, to visualise these microplastics.
The accumulation of microplastics in the human body is a growing global health concern. But current methods of imaging microplastics are invasive, hindering research into how they affect our wellbeing.
So this picture represents one of the first steps towards developing techniques and devices to take images of human tissues, which can then be used for clinical investigations into the health impacts of microplastics.
Another contender in the Biomedical Imaging category is this unusual shot of Brixton Road in south London. It doesn't bear an obvious resemblance to the bustling high street, but tells a deeper story about life and death for residents there.
Fine-particle pollution kills seven million people a year worldwide and is linked to numerous health issues, including asthma and dementia. This image shows magnified pollution particles from Brixton Road, visualising an otherwise 'invisible killer'.
It was a team effort. UK-based artist Marina Vitaglione collaborated with scientists Paul Johnson, Laura Buchanan, Stephanie Wright and Joseph Levermore from Imperial College London's Environmental Research Group to collect air-pollution samples throughout the city.
Vitaglione then photographed these samples, enlarged through a microscope, and produced a cyanotype print from the digital negatives of the close-up image.
This 19th-century camera-less photographic process involves coating paper with photosensitive chemicals and exposing it to sunlight. The resulting cyan-blue tones ironically echo the clear skies that pollution threatens.
Two of the five shortlisted photographers in the third category, 'A Storytelling Series', are also fundamentally telling climate stories.
Located in Liguria, Italy, Nemo's Garden is the world's first underwater greenhouse system.
It was created to research farming solutions for areas where growing plants may be challenging in the future. Giacomo d'Orlando's photographs set out to reveal how the biospheres work.
The images also highlight some of the discoveries that are being made about the plants. One of which is that they contain higher levels of antioxidants than the same plants grown on land, which could be useful in the development of new medicines.
By sharing this groundbreaking project, d'Orlando invites us to consider how an underwater vegetable garden might help us face the new challenges brought by climate change.
Slovenian documentary photographer Ciril Jazbec's 'A dream to cure water' series transports the viewer to Peru, home to the majority of the world's tropical glaciers. But 40 per cent of their surface area has disappeared since the 1970s because of climate change.
He explores the health impacts of rapidly melting glaciers in the Cordillera Blanca mountain range, where this is threatening water supplies and contaminating rivers with the heavy metals that accumulate over centuries within glaciers.
As glaciers are a crucial water source for mountain farming communities, this poses a serious threat to the health of local people and their livestock.
Jazbec took these images of the ways in which local people are combining ancestral knowledge with scientific monitoring equipment in an effort to protect the water and sustain their livelihoods.
'Understanding how to share and transmit ethically produced images is of the deepest importance,' says Daniella Zalcman, photographer and founder of Women Photograph, and another Wellcome Photography Prize 2025 judge.
'Not only are people trusting us with their stories of their vulnerable and traumatic experiences, we're communicating those experiences for the collective human record.'
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