Higher Ground

In Moments Before the Flood, Carl De Keyzer portrayed a Europe on the cusp of drowning, flooded due to climate change. In Higher Ground, the flood has already passed. His images show people that have fled to the high mountains, depicting a fictional world of tomorrow. A large portion of the work is irony, but it bears an uncomfortably close semblance to scientific predictions of the future. In 2006, when Keyzer first began working on Moments Before the Flood, there were a lot of doubts about the extent of global warming. Since then however, the effects of this inconvenient truth have increased by an alarming degree. Where it was once presumed that the sea level would rise 37 cm by 2050, now scientists estimate that there will be a 3-to-4-metre raise. Higher Ground explores what the world might look like if this happens, encouraging the reader to think about the impact of climate change. The images were taken in Austria, Switzerland, Germany, France and Spain. French top author Philippe Claudel wrote a new fictional story especially for this book.