Rising Tide: Visualizing the Human Costs of the Climate Crisis

To mark Earth Day 2021, the 51st anniversary of an international holiday recognizing the importance of environmental protection, we find ourselves in a world radically altered by a climate crisis. Dutch documentary photographer Kadir van Lohuizen’s work illustrates the effects of the climate crisis in locations throughout the world, including New York City. His work will be on view at the Museum this spring in our new exhibition, Rising Tide: Visualizing the Human Costs of Climate Crisis. In this opening event, Van Lohuizen sits down for a virtual conversation about the local and global impacts of the climate crisis with Henk Ovink, Dutch Special Envoy for International Water Affairs, Bangladeshi environmental activist Sharif Jamil, and Kirsty Tinto, a glaciologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Moderated by Anne Barnard of The New York Times. 

This event marks the U.S. launch of van Lohuizen's new book, After Us The Deluge: The Human Consequences of Rising Sea Levels. You can learn more about the book and purchase a copy here.  

This is the opening program for the exhibition Rising Tide: Visualizing the Human Costs of the Climate Crisis. 

About the Speakers:
Sharif Jamil is known as the Buriganga Riverkeeper. As the head of Waterkeepers Bangladesh, he is one of Bangladesh’s most outspoken and impassioned environmental advocates. Jamil leads a country-wide campaign to avert an environmental catastrophe for the country’s 165 million people, who are already suffering the effects of climate change and sea-level rise more than any other people on earth.

Henk Ovink is the Special Envoy for International Water Affairs, Kingdom of The Netherlands and Sherpa to the High Level Panel on Water. As the Ambassador for Water, he is responsible for advocating water awareness around the world, building institutional capacity and coalitions amongst governments, multilateral organizations, private sector and NGO’s, and initiating innovate approaches to address the world's stressing needs on water. Ovink served on President Obama’s Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force and teaches at Harvard GSD, the London School of Economics, and the University of Groningen.

Kadir van Lohuizen is an award-winning photojournalist. He has covered conflicts in Africa and elsewhere, but is probably best known for his long-term projects on the seven rivers of the world, the rising of sea levels, the diamond industry, and migration in the Americas. Recent projects include “Rising Tide,” which looks at the global consequences of rising sea levels caused by climate change, and “Wasteland” that investigates how six megacities manage (or mismanage) their waste. In 2018, van Lohuizen and Yuri Kozyrev were the laureates of the 9th Prix Carmignac for Photojournalism and undertook a yearlong expedition through the Arctic to document the consequences of the climate crisis. 

Kirsty Tinto is an Associate Research Scientist in the polar geophysics group at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. She works with interdisciplinary teams to understand the processes controlling ice sheet change, with a particular interest in the interactions between the cryosphere and the underlying landscape and geology. She has spent the last 10 years working with airborne surveys of Greenland and Antarctica, and is currently investigating the varied effects of sea level changes in different localities.

Anne Barnard (moderator) covers climate and environment at The New York Times, focusing on the New York area. Previously, as Beirut bureau chief, she led coverage of the Syria war for six years, reporting across the Middle East from 2012 to 2018. Since 9/11, she has chronicled the human and strategic impact of U.S. war policies, reporting from front line areas including Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Lebanon, and exploring global issues at home. Barnard has worked in the Middle East on and off since 2003, beginning at the Boston Globe in Baghdad, where she covered the American invasion and occupation of Iraq.