Does the arts world have room for another big arts prize? Every year we navigate through a crowded calendar of prizes and their glitzy awards ceremonies: the Turner Prize (£40,000), the Taylor Wessing National Portrait Gallery Photography Portrait Prize (£12,000), the Deutsche Borse Photography Prize (£30,000), the Becks Futures Prize (£20,000), an array of Jerwood visual arts prizes, the Man Booker Prize (£50,000); and this is by no means all of them. Some of them act more blatantly than others as corporate advertising campaigns. There is even a Pizza Express Prospects prize.

New prizes crop up with surprising regularity. For example, a new Japanesesponsored prize, the Daiwa Foundation Art Prize, was announced this month, designed to give a British artist the opportunity to exhibit in Japan. But the biggest and most ambitious new arts prize for a long time will hold its first awards ceremony on Thursday at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. It is the Prix Pictet, a £50,000 photography prize sponsored by a Swiss bank and dedicated to environmental sustainability.

The Prix Pictet is different from others in that it contains a campaigning element, rather than acting simply as a platform for the usual garnering of applause for an artist, or indeed as a springboard for corporate marketing. Each year the prize will have a theme in the area of environmental sustainability - this year it is water - and photographers, nominated by an international panel, have submitted works highlighting issues surrounding water and the environment.

The idea is that the work of the 18 shortlisted photographers will, when exhibited together and presented in a book, in magazine spreads and in TV documentaries, produce an emphatic message more likely to be heeded than a single photograph.

It is a serious and enterprising undertaking. Kofi Annan is the honorary president, and Francis Hodgson, the head of photographs at Sotheby's, is the chairman of a jury that includes the film director Abbas Kiarostami, the photographer Richard Misrach, and Leo Johnson, the brother of Boris and co-founder of a company called Sustainable Finance.

“Photographs can be as loaded as prose,” Hodgson says. “All the shortlisted photographers have something to say. They want the audience to be persuaded in one direction or another. Their work will sway opinions and turn attention to the issue of water... the photographs will be exhibited around the world at economic summits so that world leaders see them. They will be shown at business summits so that captains of industry see them. We want these pictures to be taken seriously at a very high level. We would hope that Angela Merkel [the German Chancellor], for example, will see these pictures and react to them.”

The shortlist is interesting. Some predictable names are there, including Edward Burtynsky, Robert Polidori, Lynn Davis and Sebastian Copeland; but there are some unknowns among them too. Munem Wasif, for example, is a Bangladeshi photojournalist, whose photographs of the impact of last year's floods in Bangladesh are stark and extraordinarily moving, a rare achievement in these days of image supersaturation.

Gentoo Rookery, a photograph of penguins in Antarctica by Copeland, has the off-putting slickness of advertising about it, which renders it all but dead; but Christian Cravo, a self-taught Brazilian, has submitted works that are nothing but alive, bursting with immediacy, and raising all sorts of questions about the sacred aspects of water and the delicate balance between humans and this precious and powerful element.

Carl De Keyzer, the Belgian freelance photographer and member of Magnum, has put in a series, Moments Before the Flood, capturing images of landscapes and water from the coastlines of England, Iceland, Poland and Scandinavia. These photographs are beautifully made and particularly unnerving, setting off loud political murmurings about things going on in our own patch of which we were perhaps unaware.

Is a photography prize too slight for such a large responsibility? “Triumphantly not,” Hodgson says. “These photographs invite us into a kind of involvement in the issues they address. They can portray small, local subject matter or giant subject matter, but they all carry larger echoes.”

In many ways the Prix Pictet is an old-fashioned prize. It is giving the opportunity for still photography to be taken very seriously, to show that it can still carry complex arguments. In its simple concept of still photographs displayed in simple narrative series with a small amount of text, the Prix Pictet becomes a kind of Picture Post or Life magazine photostory on a global scale.

Not all the shortlisted works meet the standards of coherence, intensity, truth-telling and personal accountability that one expects of a great photograph; but many do. It is not impossible that, with enough talent and energy and tenacity, the prize might not only use the Establishment, but in time reform it. It is enormously ambitious, but I think it could work.

www.prixpictet.com. Water, a book-length survey of the 2008 Prix Pictet, is published by teNeues

SHOOTING FROM THE HIP - Five great photography shows

This is War! Robert Capa at Work/On the Subject of War/Gerda Taro: A Retrospective Barbican, London (www.barbican.org.uk), until Jan 25

New Works: Pavilion Commissions 2008 National Media Museum, Bradford (www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk), until Jan 18

The Soho Archives: 1950s & 1960s Photographer's Gallery, London (www.photonet.org), until Nov 16

A Long Exposure: 100 Years of Guardian Photography The Lowry, Salford Quays (www.thelowry.com), until Mar 1

Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize National Portrait Gallery, London (www.npg.org.uk), from Nov 6 to Feb 15

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