ASTANA — The residence of the British Embassy in Astana briefly turned into something between a gallery and a quiet warning system on April 21. The occasion was Wildlife Photographer of the Year, one of the world’s most respected nature photography competitions, produced by the Natural History Museum in London.
For over six decades, it has done what policy papers often fail to do: make environmental change visible, immediate, and uncomfortably real. Works submitted to the Wildlife Photographer of the Year by Natural History Museum in London at the residence of the British Embassy in Astana on April 21.
Photo credit: British Embassy in Kazakhstan This year alone, the competition drew 60,636 entries from 113 countries. Numbers like that usually signal scale. Here, they also signal urgency. British Ambassador Sally Axworthy noted that the images are judged anonymously: no reputations, no geography, just the raw evidence of what is happening to the natural world.
“I think in the pictures you can see some of the stresses that it’s under,” she added, referring to biodiversity itself. Axworthy also noted that Kazakhstan, with its rich biodiversity, remains underrepresented in global environmental storytelling. “We would very much like to have more entries from Central Asia.
In the West, we don’t know enough about Kazakhstan’s biodiversity,” she said. The country is the home of the domestic apple, the birthplace of the tulip—not the Netherlands, “as we were led to believe,” she added. Ambassador Axworthy and Chair of IPCC Skea delivering remarks on April 21.
Photo credit: British Embassy in Kazakhstan Axworthy also shared impressions from her recent visit to the Aksu-Zhabagly Nature Reserve, the country’s oldest, founded in 1926. “Everywhere we went, there were species that were particular to that area, didn’t grow anywhere else,” she said, listing mountain onions, saiga and snow leopards.
The subtext was clear: Kazakhstan is not a peripheral ecosystem. It is a critical one. That point is already being tested in practice. Axworthy highlighted the Altyn Dala conservation initiative, which won the Earthshot Prize backed by Prince William. The project helped bring the saiga antelope back from the edge of extinction to a population of around four million.