How we turned deadly heatwaves into vacation brochures

Look, here's a thought experiment for you.

Imagine if we covered earthquakes exclusively with photos of families having picnics in the park. Or if every story about devastating floods featured kids splashing in puddles. During COVID, we all remember those haunting images – empty Times Square, mass graves in Brazil, refrigerated trucks outside hospitals. What if instead we'd only shown families baking sourdough?

Sounds insane, right? Yet that's exactly what we're doing with extreme heat.

We're talking about half a million deaths annually from heat – 178,000 in Europe alone, according to Lancet Planetary Health. Stress on livestock and wildlife, plants that can't just migrate to cooler spots like animals can. Major crops like wheat, corn, and rice producing less. And what do we show? Tourists dipping their toes in fountains. Kids eating ice cream. Young women in bikinis, shot from behind (definitely not for privacy reasons).

The story we're not telling

I covered last summer's European heatwave like many other journalists. I followed all the best practices: avoided apocalyptic tones that make people give up, steered clear of the "everything's fine" narrative that normalizes disaster. Found experts, wrote the piece, calibrated the message. Nothing heroic, just responsible reporting of an important and delicate topic – but not so common, at least in Italy, judging by this report from Greenpeace and the Osservatorio di Pavia.

Then came time to pick the images. Usually it's simple: type in keywords, browse the photo libraries, pick something that works. Not this time.

Search "heatwave" or "extreme heat" on any stock photo site. You'll find: gelato lines, fountain fun, river jumps, and those spray fountains that shoot up from the pavement – perfect for kids and, apparently, photographers. The images could double as tourism ads or the world's worst postcard collection. They tell a completely different story than the one I'd just spent hours writing.

Here's the thing: most climate journalism guidelines say nothing about images. The ones that do – like Covering Climate Now – mention it as an afterthought. Only the European Broadcasting Union's report actually dedicates real space to visual choices. Perhaps they assume someone else will handle it – a picture editor, maybe. But most newsrooms don't have those anymore. It's usually the writer, exhausted and ready to publish, or someone else without training who picks the image. Even dedicated picture editors follow newsroom culture, which often means: make it eye-catching.

For every Guardian article (they revised their image guidelines in 2019), we get thousands of ice creams and pool parties.