Photographer Nichole Sobecki, along with writer Laura Heaton, spent years documenting parts of Somalia, a country traumatized by over 25 years of conflict and ravaged by climate change. As Sobecki put it, “In a generation, parts of Somalia went from being semi-arid to desert, fueling conflict and pushing one of the world’s most resilient communities to the brink.”

This week, BRIGHT is partnering with Women Photograph to spotlight female photographers covering calamities around the world.

BRIGHT: Why was climate migration in Somalia the story you wanted to tell?

I was interested in exploring the connection between the environment and security, a theme playing out in many parts of the world, when I teamed up with Laura [Heaton].

She had discovered an incredible archive of nearly 10,000 never-before-seen photographs of Somalia’s landscape, tucked away in an attic in the British countryside. The photographs were the work of Dr. Murray Watson, a Cambridge-educated ecologist who spent the 1970s and 80s traveling by bush plane and LandRover, developing the country’s only land survey. In 2008, Dr. Watson was kidnapped in southern Somalia and hasn’t been seen since.

We decided to use this trove of images to bridge the past and present, retracing the steps of Dr. Watson and his team to understand how dramatically Somalia’s landscape has been transformed by climate change and environmental degradation.

BRIGHT: What makes this story a calamity?

NS: In just a generation, parts of Somalia went from being semi-arid to desert, pushing one of the world’s most resilient communities to the brink. Having spent the last few years with Laura documenting this transformation, this calamity is unfortunately all too clear.

Most Somalis live and die depending on each year’s rainfall. For generations, people have survived extreme conditions, relying on tradition and community. A quarter century of civil war has tested those ties. But rain falls less now, and temperatures are rising. “With this weather pattern, Somalis will not survive,” said Fatima Jibrell, an environmental activist. “Maybe the land, a piece of desert called ‘Somalia,’ will exist on the map of the world, but Somalis cannot survive.”

BRIGHT: Why is it important for women to cover calamity? Why is women’s representation in all journalism important?

NS: We carry our identities and experiences into our work, which is part of why it’s so critical to push for greater diversity within the media. Your gender, background, race, nationality, and religion all shape your perceptions and the very stories you seek out. The greater the range of ethical, intelligent storytellers, the more textured and nuanced of stories we’ll have access to.

Within photography, the gender gap is enormous. Over the last ten years, the number of female entrants to the World Press Photo Contest has hovered around 15%. The disparity is particularly stark when it comes to covering conflict and calamity, where the expectation often bends towards scrappy, Robert Capa types. This is also the area where women’s voices are perhaps most needed — particularly in cultures where men and women live separate lives. In these cases, women are more often able to photograph both genders, while men will never be able to access the world of women.

A female photographer can also be seen as less threatening, particularly for women who have experienced trauma — if they’ve faced violence at the hands of men, or survived breast cancer, or lost a child. Covering calamity can also be dangerous and, from my experience, women tend to go into these situations more prepared. It’s not to say that they don’t take the same risks as men, simply that planning tends to be more extensive.

BRIGHT: Tell us about someone who stuck with you after your reporting ended.

Over the course of our reporting, Laura and I met Somalis struggling to make impossible choices in the face of environmental changes. Too often, they were pushed towards conflict and migration. We spoke with a fisherman who started pirating boats when he could no longer make a living at sea, a camel herder who went to war with neighbors over pasture and water, and a farmer who joined the extremist group al-Shabab when drought became too intense.

One of the people I’ll most remember though, was a climate refugee named Mohamed. When we met him he was living in Kenya’s Dadaab Refugee Camp with his family, but for years he had stayed under al-Shabab’s control on his farm in southern Somalia . It was difficult, he told us, but it was his home. Ultimately what pushed him out wasn’t terrorism — it was the climate. Like so many others, he left Somalia during the 2011 drought. Now he has nothing to return to. His story really stuck with me because of his gentle determination to care of his family amidst so many challenges. It also made me realize that, despite having reported from Dadaab many times before, I had been asking the wrong questions. If you only ask about terrorism, those are the only answers you’ll get. But when we really delved into people’s broader motivations, the environmental roots of so many of Somalia’s current insecurities became all too clear.

BRIGHT: Any glimmers of hope? Were there any people or institutions that were making a significant dent on this problem?

Before the collapse of the Somali state in 1991, preservation of the land was a priority. The National Range Agency — the organization Dr. Watson’s land survey was for — was the best funded government agency in Somalia. The capital city, Mogadishu, had an herbarium. The last 25 years have yielded tremendous environmental destruction, however, due to climate change, charcoal burning and deforestation, and the plundering of Somalia’s waters from overfishing.

I wish I could say that there were more comprehensive efforts to reverse these trends, but from our reporting the most significant forward momentum came not from organizations but from individuals. Dr. Abdirisak Ali, a protégé of Dr. Watson, is now leading the team developing Somalia’s climate change policy. Fatima Jibrell is a passionate advocate for the environment and founder of Adeso Africa. Buri Hamza left the safety of his home in Canada to serve as Somalia’s top environmental official before he was killed in 2016 when al-Shabab detonated a car bomb outside his hotel in Mogadishu. It’s these extraordinary men and women, who believe so fiercely that their country’s future is intimately tied to its environment, with whom I lay my faith.

BRIGHT: Tell us about one photograph in a bit more depth.

Driving through a drought-stricken area of western Somaliland in 2016, we came across a group of women washing their clothes in a roadside puddle — the only water they could find. They told us about the challenges they faced, of the animals they’d lost in the drought, and the wells that had dried up.

As they turned to walk home, I took this image of one of the women in a field of cacti. The colors of her scarf melded into the vegetation and sky, and I was reminded of how intimate the ties are between people’s lives and the land.

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