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Daniela Sala

Photographer

Daniela Sala

Iraq, The Price of oil

Iraq is among the countries in the world most exposed to the effects of the climate crisis. While the effects of rising temperatures and erratic rainfall is certainly relevant and relatively talked about, the role of the oil industry is too often concealed.

In Basra, which exports two-third of the Iraqi oil (following the war in Ukraine, increasingly towards Europe), international oil companies failed to invest into existing technology that might limit the impact of their activities.

They pump water from the rivers to extract the oil and, despite the World Bank recommendation, routinely flare the natural gas associated with extraction - a practice extremely harmful to human health and the environment.

As a result, cancer in the region is on the raise and rivers are running dry. An ecological disaster is looming over the country, where local communities are left to pay the price of an irreversible environmental degradation.

Daniela Sala

Daniela Sala is an Italian photographer and journalist. She graduated in Journalism at Turin university in 2010 and has worked as a freelance multimedia journalist since. In 2017, after landing a scholarship to attend the WSP Masterclass in Photography in Rome, she started working as a freelance photographer. Her main focus are medium and long-term photo projects, with a documentary approach. In the past years she covered mental health, Queer activism in the SWANA region, drone attacks in Northern Iraq, and the water crisis in Syria and Iraq. Her works have been published by Der Spiegel, Trouw, Woz, TRT, The Guardian, El Paìs, De Morgen, Profil, Al-Monitor, Venerdì, Internazionale, YoDona, Elle, NewsDeeply, OpenMigration, RaiNews24, Corriere della Sera, SwissTV, among others. She is the co-founder of FADA collective, a network of independent journalists in Italy.