KYOTO 40
My family and I visited Kyoto in mid July 2018 just as the region was sweltering in an unprecedented summer heatwave. Each day the official temperature was around 40 Celsius and several degrees higher in direct sun. The heatwave was the lead news story, with heatstroke hospitalising 22,000 and killing 65 people across southern Japan.
Nearly 21 years earlier the leaders of major industrialised nations met in Kyoto to agree on ways to reduce carbon emissions and combat the effects of climate change. The Kyoto Protocol became effective in 2005, however with some major nations not ratifying the agreement (or later withdrawing) and many nations not meeting their emission reduction targets, some commentators say the treaty was flawed from the beginning and was never going to work. They believe ongoing policy failures now leave the world in the potentially catastrophic position of having to adapt to, rather than mitigate, the effects of climate change. After my experience here, and with reports of record heatwaves sweeping the globe, I worry those commentators are being proven correct.
This series was unplanned (and incomplete I guess because the temperature limited what we could do) and so the images are simply my brief observations from Kyoto in the heat. Armed with ample sunscreen and plenty of water I covered what ground I could, including more unfamiliar parts of the city, all the while wondering what the leaders who met here in 1997 might be thinking about the heatwaves sweeping the globe in 2018.
