Fabrice Monteiro travelled to the most polluted places in Africa and created terrifying characters who roamed their midst dressed in eerie debris. They are spirits, he says, on a mission to make humans change their ways. Informed by Africa’s environmental problems, Fabrice Monteiro’s photographs aim to highlight urgent ecological issues all over the world. His series “The Prophecy” is on show at Photo Basel 2017 until 18 June. (Photo by Fabrice Monteiro/Photo Basel 2017/Mariane Ibrahim Gallery/The Guardian)

In this Friday, January 7, 2011 photo, people carry baskets of coal scavenged illegally at an open-cast mine in the village of Bokapahari in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand where a community of coal scavengers live and work. The world's biggest coal users – China, the United States and India – have boosted coal mining in 2017, in an abrupt departure from last year's record global decline for the heavily polluting fuel and a setback to efforts to rein in climate change emissions. (Photo by Kevin Frayer/AP Photo)

In this February 26, 1962 file photo, Mercury astronaut John Glenn, and his wife, Annie, ride in the back of an open car with Vice-President Johnson during a parade in Glenn's honor in Washington. The Capitol is seen in the background. Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth who later spent 24 years representing Ohio in the Senate, died Thursday, Dec. 8, 2016, at the age of 95. (Photo by AP Photo)

In this January 7, 2017 photo, Judeley Hans Debel squats down to remove a boot from Tic Tac, holding out his prosthetic leg after his therapeutic riding lesson at the Chateaublond Equestrian Center in Petion-Ville, Haiti. Anne-Rose Schoen, who founded the equestrian center, said perhaps the most important thing about therapeutic riding is it makes youngsters happy in a country where disabled people face enormous challenges. (Photo by Dieu Nalio Chery/AP Photo)

In this Wednesday, April 12, 2017, photo, waitresses wait outside a restaurant in Pyongyang, North Korea. A generational divide is quietly growing in North Korea, often hidden behind relentless propaganda. On the streets there are young women in not-quite mini-skirts and teenage boys with baseball hats cocked sideways, K-pop style. (Photo by Wong Maye-E/AP Photo)

This August 28, 2017 photo shows eight-year-old Indian girl Bharti performing a balancing act on a rope during a street show in Batala, India. Travelling Indian performers, who earn a meagre income from putting on shows on the streets, often scout areas to gather a large street audience who then give money on a collection plate at the end of the show. (Photo by Narinder Nanu/AFP Photo)

A woman takes photos as Mount Agung volcano sends up another plume of smoke, seen from the Kubu subdistrict in Karangasem Regency on Indonesia's resort island of Bali on July 5, 2018. Mount Agung roared to life again on July 2, belching a plume of ash 2,000 metres (6,500 feet) high, as well as temporarily shuttering the airport and grounding hundreds of flights after erupting the week before. (Photo by Sonny Tumbelaka/AFP Photo)

In this September 9, 2018 photo, a diver holds onto his catch of lobsters during a fishing journey in the Miskito coast near Cay Savannah, Honduras. A diver makes 75 lempiras ($3) per pound of lobster. An average 10-pound daily haul of lobster is a windfall for people in one of the most impoverished regions of the Americas, so many take the risk, and many suffer for it. (Photo by Rodrigo Abd/AP Photo)