This year’s World Press Photo winners have been announced last week in Amsterdam: the grand prize went to Chiba Yasuyosi, Agence France-Presse’s (AFP) Chief Photographer for East Africa and Indian Ocean for his photo Straight Voice, in which a young Sudanese man recites a poem at a demonstration. But what is even more exciting for us is that a Hungarian photographer, Eszter Horváth won the Environmental category this year.

Eszter has been involved in the photography of the Arctic Sea since 2015, and last year she captured the everyday life of the German research ship Polarstern in the Arctic. On the award-winning image, a polar bear and a cub are curiously examining equipment placed by Polarstern researchers on an ice floe.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B9C6mHpKMvm/?utm_source=ig_embed

We need to know the background of the image to understand its real meaning: the Arctic harbor is some of the fastest-retreating sea ice on the planet and has twice the average global heating rate. This will strongly affect the global climate in terms of increasing temperatures and sea-level rise, yet Arctic climate system processes are poorly represented in climate models.

Eszter’s photos have already appeared in National Geographic, Geo magazine, the New York Times and Time, and we’re sure we’ll see her unique photos again in many magazines after that. Congratulation!