Visual counter-storytelling against iconic photographs of rising sea levels: The Pacific Climate Warriors on Instagram

Iconic photographs of low-lying Pacific islands surrounded by vast oceans are widely used by international news media to symbolize the threat that climate change poses to coastal areas around the world. However, such images often lack human presence, reducing these islands to abstract representations of ecological fragility and obscuring the active roles of local communities in climate advocacy and adaptation. By examining iconic photographs of ‘sinking’ Pacific islands through a narrative lens, this article offers two key contributions to the study of climate change visuality. First, it explores how these images evoke the ‘doomed islands’ master narrative, a colonial construct that frames Pacific islands as inherently vulnerable and reliant on external intervention. Second, it investigates how the Pacific Climate Warriors, a youth-led grass-roots network of activists from across the Pacific, engage in visual counter-storytelling on Instagram, thus offering rare insight into how frontline communities in the Global South use visual social media to represent climate change. A quantitative content analysis shows that the Pacific Ocean is recast as a connector rather than an asocial void or an isolating expanse – a discursive shift that opens alternative narrative possibilities. In particular, it enables a line of emplotment that traces climate change impacts in the Pacific to fossil fuel consumption in the Global North, rather than to inherent geographic features. At the same time, it allows Pacific Islanders to appear not as passive victims but as active agents engaged in a transnational movement for climate justice.