Picture by Ronald de Hommel
One of the projects I’m currently involved in (and one I’m particularly proud of) is Disputed Waters. I joined this group of journalists and photographers in 2011, when the project was already well underway, because I liked their innovative ideas about journalism and storytelling. The brains behind Disputed Waters are Johannes Abeling and Ronald de Hommel. With the latter I followed the Mekong River from Laos to Vietnam. Our web documentary about the rapid development of this river and the consequences for local populations, will be published soon. Here’s some brief information about the project, but don’t forget to visit the Disputed Waters website as well.
What is Disputed Waters?
Disputed Waters is a multimedia project bringing together journalists, photographers and videographers to explore stories about transboundary rivers. We trace the stories of rivers where water risks becoming a source of conflict due to climate change and our increasing world population.
About what is Disputed Waters?
We’re interested in the impact of climate change and growing world population on our globalised society. Many experts are predicting that the wars of the future will be fought over water. Well, we tend to agree. Actually there have been many water conflicts in the past, and some are happening right now – for the moment, they are not on the world’s radar because until now, they haven’t – fortunately – been very violent.
But there’s no guarantee that these conflicts will continue to be low-profile in the future. Our aim is to report on the risks of future water conflicts and to investigate what conflicts have been bubbling in recent years. Our project is about painting the big picture, the geo-political story, but we also aim to show the impact of climate change on the man or woman on the street – what are the consequences of pollution, over-consumption etc for them?
Why Disputed Waters?
Disputed Waters is an initiative of a group of freelance photographers and journalists. The idea to start this project came from a few new trends in the world of journalism.
1. There’s less and less money available through the traditional media to produce in depth reports.
2. Technology offers new ways to present the work, and the traditional media are slow to adapt to this.
So we decided to create our own platform where we can present our work the way we want it to be seen and where we can experiment with different publishing options.
