FLORIAN LEDOUX captures the polar regions

Ten years in the French Navy inspired photographer Florian Ledoux’s love of the ocean. His stunning shots offer poignant insight into the climate change threats to the polar regions

Florian Ledoux

French born, multi-award-winning conservation photographer Florian is self taught. His first ice exploration was to Lapland, aged 10. A teen love of photography led to a job behind the lens with the French Navy. Now based in Arctic TromsØ, his work depicts the impact of climate change on the frozen continents, and his photography featured in books for David Attenborough’s Our Planet and Seven Worlds, One Planet

OUR FROZEN PLANET

Think of the polar regions and the first thing that comes to mind is ice. Glaciers, ice sheets, sea ice, pack ice, caps and icebergs cover around 10 per cent of the Earth’s surface, with 90 per cent of that found in Antarctica. But these figures are in rapid decline, and what we see today is a stark contrast to the scenes witnessed a mere century ago, when Ernest Shackleton set out on his quest through ice-dotted bays towards the South Pole. It’s a similar story in the northern hemisphere. The ice around both poles is melting at record speed. This not only threatens the health of the ocean, but the polar communities and creatures – polar bears, whales, seals, fish and marine life, sea birds and other mammals – that call it home.

These extreme regions of natural wonder are a web of complex ecosystems that unite the ocean, wildlife, indigenous communities and the rest of the world. Ice is a vital lifeforce in these parts. Such depletion is devastating for the animals that depend on sea ice and pack ice as hunting platforms. For fish, dwindling ice mass means less plankton habitat to feed on; for indigenous people, who hunt and fish, the knock-on effect threatens their livelihood and culture, not to mention their homelands, which are at risk to rising sea levels.

Scientists report that the world has lost around 28 trillion tonnes of ice over the last 30 years. In the Arctic, where change is twice as fast as elsewhere, some 95 per cent of the oldest ice has already gone, causing polar bears to flee to local villages to seek food at the risk of human conflict. Some estimates say the Arctic could be ice free in as little as 20 years. The cause? Industrialisation has led to increasing CO2 emissions, rising temperatures, glacial melt and elevated sea levels across the globe. As the ice melts and the ocean opens up, fishing fleets, shipping, oil and gas companies see opportunity, putting paid to an already troubling scene.

A move from fossil fuels to renewable energy is the most obvious way to combat such a global crisis. This requires greater awareness from more people, and for Florian the camera lens is the gateway to a wider call to action. Photography is powerful and through his work he encourages his audience to reconnect with nature and better understand it. His compositions – both wider perspective and intimate framing – aim to draw people in and evoke an emotional response to the fragility of these precious regions. His hope is that more people will feel inspired to help preserve and protect them, and the wider world, for a brighter future.

On an iceberg in Svalbard, Norway, a polar bear hunts for seals. Framing this familiar creature – simultaneously strong, yet fragile – within its larger habitat, Florian captures how vital ice is for wildlife

Top: a fresh perspective of the polar bear's natural hunting ground in Svalbard – a stark terrain increasingly under threat from climate change

Middle: low numbers of wildlife on Greenland's east coast make this close encounter with an Arctic fox a rare occurrence

Bottom: shot in Nunavut, northern Canada, drone technology offers a new frame of reference on the symbiotic relationship between polar bears and the ocean – seen here amid melting sea ice

With some taller than skyscrapers, the icebergs in and around Disko Bay, near Illulissat in western Greenland, are among the most numerous and impressive in the northern hemisphere. As the ice compresses, air bubbles are pushed out, resulting in the absorption of only small amounts of red light. This is then refracted as the blue tint seen here

Top: living primarily on free-floating pack ice, Antarctica's seafaring crabeater seals are sustained by the Southern Ocean's Antarctic krill

Bottom: shot in Antarctica, the framing of this iceberg, offers insight into the melting layers that lie beneath the frozen peaks

Crabeater seals are often seen swimming in numbers of up to several hundred. Here, amid broken sea ice in Antarctica, a group rests after their feed. The region has seen a loss of around 60 million tonnes of ice each year since the early Nineties – that's around six times more than the previous 40 years combined and is mostly due to rising sea temperatures