Nature red in tooth and claw in Namibia

Etosha, Namibia‘s ‘great white place’ and ‘lake of mothers tears’, is one of the world’s great nature reserves. This 22,000sq km expanse of savannah and desert is home to countless iconic animals, including the critically endangered African black rhinoceros.

Just now its landscape, gleaming white under the merciless tropical sun, resembles the surface of Mars, the sparse vegetation dusty greyish in the heat, an apocalyptic vision of our overheated planet’s surface when runaway climate change takes off in the decades to come.