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The economic system in which we are immersed generates situations of inequality, impoverishment and abuse everywhere. We live in a society blinded by the growing need for growth, in which the limitlessness of production and consumption only leads to the exploitation of renewable and non-renewable natural resources and to the increase of garbage and waste, namely pollution of water and air. This vicious circle is one of the reasons, along with climate change, of the major social and environmental changes that mainly affect the everyday life of those people living in so-called “border” or “frontier” countries. The earth is a fragile balance not only in its ecosystem mechanisms, but also in the overall functioning of human societies. All this disorder that destroys primary resources, caused by pollution, drought, desertification and soil degradation, prevents local population from continuing living according to their traditional ways. To protect the “spirit of a place” means to help its inhabitants to stay rather than to escape and become “climate refugees” or “eco-refugees”, people on the go who can no longer live in the land where they were born and raised. “Child survival in a changing climate“ is a project by photographer Luca Catalano Gonzaga, supported by the Nando and Elsa Peretti Foundation, which aims to document the consequences of climate change on the environment and on the lives of the inhabitants, with a particular focus on children, the first victims of this epochal event. A journey to tell the increasing desertification in the Gobi in Mongolia, the refugees’ camps in Dadaab in Kenya, the glaciers in Nepal, the villages in Zambia affected by malaria, the desertified areas of the Sahel in Burkina Faso, deforestation in Borneo in Indonesia, the rise in sea level in the Gulf of Bengal in Bangladesh and wind farms in India. (text by Sebastiano Caputo).
