Local Population in Afghanistan

Kalam Niso with her young children Noori, Khalil and Nazifa. Three months earlier five of Kalam Niso's sons had left the village to look for work elsewhere. When they didn't return their father left as well. She has no food to feed her family and she doesn't have any news on the whereabouts of her sons and husband. "Only God knows if they will come back", she said. In her garden there was the only fruit tree of the entire village. "Apricots have a short season, after that we won't have anything left to eat. My children are hungry but I don't even have a goat or a sheep to slaughter. Nobody can help us. Even the rich merchants of the village have gone poor because of the drought", said Kalam Niso.

Restrictions

NO FUNDRAISING

Unique identifier: GP01X38

Type: Image

Shoot date: 01/06/2001

Locations: Afghanistan, Asia, Shahr-e Bozorg

Credit line: © Robert Knoth / Greenpeace

Size: 5000px × 5000px 13MB

Ranking: ★★★★ (E)

Containers

Shoot:

Climate Voices from Afghanistan

Photographer Robert Knoth and writer Antoinette de Jong traveled on horseback for weeks around the remote areas of northern Afghanistan where the population was suffering from a severe drought. Climate change and overpopulation are causing erosion and a collapse of the fragile livelihoods for the majority of rural Afghans. The overgrazing and overpopulation are depleting meadows and agricultural lands, making these ever more vulnerable to the changing climate and increasingly extreme weather in the Hindu Kush-Himalayas mountain range. The Hindu Kush-Himalayas serves as water towers tot 1.3 billion people who depend on the glaciers to sustain their ecosystems and as a source of freshwater. The UNEP/World Glacier Monitoring Service estimated that the glacier area in northern Afghanistan decreased by more than 50 percent over the 20th century.

Conceptually similar