The fragile Wadden Sea is one of the last wilderness areas in Europe. Threateded by climate change, it has become a laboratory of innovative eco-sustainable practices
It is the world's largest laboratory of sustainability, a complex ecosystem where man learns to coexist with nature. And to manage one of the most fragile heritages on the planet: the Wadden Sea in Northern Europe. An immense wetland shaped by the tides that became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2009. This is where modern ecology was born at the end of the 19th century and this is where scientists today are asking the questions of the future: how to deal with rising waters? How to protect native species? How to reduce the impact of fishing and agriculture? How to promote increasingly responsible tourism?
Four times a day, the tides move 15 million cubic metres of water, regenerating a dynamic world of sand, mud, dunes, salt marshes, peat bogs and artificial dams. The Wadden Sea 500 kilometres between Holland, Germany and Denmark is an ever-changing habitat: an inland sea where the coexistence of nature, animals and humans has always been experienced. A magical place where islands disappear and reappear, and where millions of migratory birds feast there every year on their way south.
Popular with travellers, who come to take long walks in the mud and observe its small animals, the Wadden Sea is a concentration of centres of excellence. Such as the Danish Centre for Wadden Sea Research or the Dutch Zeehondencentrum, which works to protect seals, or the German Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), which recently raised the alarm on climate change. 'Rising temperatures and sea levels,' explains marine ecologist Christian Buschbaum, 'are changing coastal morphology and sediment dynamics. A habitat thousands of years old is changing at an unprecedented speed'.
Finalist Still Life category, 2025 Sony World Photography Award
