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11 photos: Winners of the Mangrove Photography Awards 2026
EDITOR’S NOTE: Call to Earth is a CNN editorial series committed to reporting on the environmental challenges facing our planet, together with the solutions. Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative has partnered with CNN to drive awareness and education around key sustainability issues and to inspire positive action.
For years, Gaurav Patil has seen abandoned fishing nets snag and tangle in India’s mangroves. They’re known as “ghost nets” and can break down into microplastics, choke the coastal trees and disrupt the ecosystem.
Motivated to expose this “overlooked” crisis, he took his camera to a tide-swept shore of Nandgaon village, Maharashtra, south of Mumbai, and captured an image of a tree at night, using a 13-second UV exposure that gave an eerie glow to the net caught in its canopy. The resulting image is the overall winner of the 2026 Mangrove Photography Awards.
