‘We had to swim to safety. I didn’t think we would make it out alive’: the people fleeing climate breakdown – in pictures

Photographers Mathias Braschler and Monika Fischer capture the families, farmers and fishers who have been forced to leave their homes by extreme weather – and the landscapes they left behind. Introduction by Dina NayeriIn 2009, Swiss photographers Mathias Braschler and Monika Fischer set out to document the people suffering the first shocks of the climate crisis. They had just returned from China, where rapid, unregulated development has ravaged the natural landscapes. Back home, though, the debate still felt strangely theoretical. “In 2009, you still had people who denied climate change,” Braschler recalls. “People said, ‘This is media hype.’” So the couple, working with the Global Humanitarian Forum in Geneva and supported by Kofi Annan, began The Human Face of Climate Change, a portrait series that showed the people on the frontline of a warming world.Sixteen years later, climate change is no longer up for debate; the urgent discussions now revolve around solutions. Braschler and F