The UK is already feeling the effects of global warming, as rising temperatures put native species at risk of extinction

Rising temperatures and sea levels brought on by climate change could have devastating effects on British wildlife from salmon to wildfowl, the Environment Agency warned today as climate talks entered a second week in Copenhagen.

The agency said the country’s waterways could be hit by invading species, such as African clawed toads and South American water primrose, which spread disease to native wildlife and clog up rivers and streams, causing flooding.

Fish species such as Atlantic salmon and trout, which need cold water may struggle to survive, are already declining in warming southern English rivers and estuaries.

Insects, which form an integral part of the food chain, will fall by a fifth for every 1C rise in temperatures in upland streams, the government agency warned.

Rising sea levels could inundate salt marshes and mudflats, which are used by migrating birds such as redshank plovers and wildfowl.

According to the government’s conservation agency, Natural England, the UK’s wildlife – from oak trees to newts – is already feeling the effects of climate change.

Lord Chris Smith, chairman at the Environment Agency, said: “There is a danger that we think of climate change as something that is happening in other countries. But it’s not just polar bears and rainforests that are at risk.

“What we see in our rivers, gardens, seas and skies here in the UK is already changing and delays in reducing harmful greenhouse gas emissions will lead to more severe impacts.”

The Wildlife Trust is warning that species such as hazel dormice and bluebells are under pressure because of warmer weather, which will affect hibernating animals and bring trees into leaf earlier.

But warmer temperatures could allow the likes of spoonbills, wasp spiders and loose-flowered orchids to become more abundant or colonise for the first time.

European birds and insects which can easily move could be the first to increase their range into this country, while those native species least able to move their ranges further north or higher into the uplands as temperatures rise are most at risk of declines or extinction.

Dr Tom Tew, chief scientist at Natural England, said studies dating over the past 75 years show oak trees are coming into leaf three weeks earlier than they were in the 1950s.

As a result, insects are shifting their emergence patterns to fit in, which deprives birds of food to feed their chicks.

Newts are coming back into ponds in November, instead of March as they were in the 1970s, and swallows in Cornwall “aren’t even bothering to migrate” south in winter, he said.

Tew believes the answer, for both wildlife and humans, is to work with the natural environment to help people, plants and animals adapt to the warming climate.

For example, creating salt marshes on the coast protects against flooding more cost effectively than concrete walls, provides carbon storage, nurseries for fish stocks and habitat for wildlife.

And we need to make the landscape more “permeable”, allowing wildlife to move further north and higher up as temperatures rise by providing more “stepping stones” such as ponds and hedgerows.

The Environment Agency is working to provide new habitats to replace lost wetlands and improve water quality to give species vulnerable to climate change such as eels the best chance of survival.

Smith said there was also an urgent need for all countries to limit their emissions to avoid the “disastrous consequences” of a world in which temperatures rise by 4C or more.

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President Lyndon Johnson and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made stark warnings about global warming decades ago, but convincing evidence for action only amassed in recent years, experts say.

A 190-nation U.N. conference in Copenhagen in December is due to agree a new U.N. pact to curb greenhouse gas emissions to slow a rise in temperatures to prevent floods, droughts, wildfires or rising sea levels.

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Thanks to dimwit voiceovers and preachy tutting, green films are taking a beating at the box office. But a new film about the slaughter of dolphins in Japan may change all that

We’ve already seen one of the unforeseen effects of global warming. The eco-documentary has become as much of a staple of the cinema schedules as the duff geezer flick or the drippy indie romcom. Round they come, the green screen hopefuls, month in, month out, as sure as rising sea levels and – sometimes, at least – almost as wet.

There are the ones about the end of the world. There are single-issue ones, about soil or oil or fish. There are gimmicky ones, in which a man spends a month scoffing Big Macs, or a year living carbon-neutral, or goes for swims in polluted rivers, or faces up to the fact that he’s not going to be president. There are ones that make you swap lightbulbs, the ones that suggest you adopt a goat. There are ones in glossy 3D, featuring an A-list actor doing the voiceover and endangered beasties scuttling about under an ominous sky.

Next week, there’s another one. But The Cove is different. This is an eco-documentary that doesn’t assume being right is enough to put bums on seats. It doesn’t make the mistake of thinking that a gap in education is the problem that most pressingly needs addressing; its producers know that if you’re forking out to see it, chances are you’re already well informed. The Cove has no room for the dimwit voiceover (by contrast, The Vanishing of the Bees, out last week, addresses its audience as if they were at the movies to fill the gap between literacy hour and playtime). It has no room, either, for any disappointed tutting, as perfected by The Age of Stupid’s Pete Postlethwaite, last man standing in a climate-fried 2055, shaking his head over film of people squandering the Earth’s resources in 2009. Nor does it bombard the viewer with diagrams, statistics or action checklists.

In fact, it’s a slick, zippy, snazzily soundtracked entertainment. Pierce Brosnan told The Cove’s director, Louie Psihoyos, it was the best heist movie he’d ever seen. The New York Times called it a “Trojan horse … an exceptionally well-made documentary that unfolds like a spy thriller, complete with bugged hotel rooms, clandestine derring-do and mysterious men in grey flannel suits”.

The Cove’s subject is the slaughter of wild dolphins in one small cove in Japan – some 23,000 of them each year. This was brought to the attention of Psihoyos, previously a photographer for National Geographic, by one Ric O’Barry, a former trainer of Flipper who is now an animal activist. Many knew about the killing, but no one had ever witnessed it – apart from the hired harpooners who would trap the dolphins in the heavily guarded cove, then kill them. So Psihoyos assembled a crack team to help him get the footage, including Olympic divers, an air force engineer, a stuntman and a team of designers from Industrial Light & Magic, who hid cameras in fake rocks to be planted around the cove.

The Cove is thrilling: exuberant, amusing, theatrical. Until, that is, it gets to the footage of the slaughter. Then it’s horrific. Cinematical’s reviewer wrote that, in a career watching horror films, “I’ve never seen anything quite as disturbing as the final sequences of The Cove”.

Leaving aside the fact that the most impressive footage in the film was, in fact, shot by a rock, it’s a virtuoso piece of movie-making. To secure that 12A certificate, despite the horrors, Psihoyos aped Hitchcock’s Psycho shower scene, never actually showing a harpoon piercing flesh (there’s always a layer of water between them). The whole film, it turns out, was meticulously pieced together in post-production – its plot born of the cutting room, not the storyboard. “It happened organically,” says Psihoyos. “We let it tell it itself.”

That is why The Cove succeeds. It doesn’t nag or holler; it lets its audience join the dots. It’s made by people with enough detachment to be sly, satiric, even aesthetic. It is the closest thing green cinema has got to its own Dr Strangelove.

Most eco-docs, on the other hand, are labours of love, and proud of it; made not to tell a story but to save the world. “It’s everything I ever wanted to say in my whole life,” explained one director I spoke to. But such drive, through admirable, cripples any lightness of touch and ensures the audience will exit the cinema with a one-note reaction – be it rage, despair or boredom. Says Psihoyos: “I love documentaries, but I always start looking at my watch. It’s like taking medicine or eating your vegetables – you’d always rather eat your sweets first.”

The Cove dishes out a lot of sweets, and has been appreciated accordingly. At some point over next 10 days or so it’s likely to enter the 100 top-grossing documentaries ever. Impressive, eh? Very, compared to the competition. Last weekend, The Vanishing of the Bees opened across 24 UK cinemas to take a total of £2,154 – that’s an average of £89 per screen. The Cove has so far taken about $810,000 (£507,000) in the US.

But to enter the overall 100 top-grossing films, it would need to take some 419,753 times more than it has so far managed (Shrek is currently at No 100, with an inflation-adjusted $340m [£213m] box-office total). That gives an idea of the small reach of even the most successful eco-doc; The Cove has been seen by roughly as many people in the US as saw Sex Lives of the Potato Men over here.

The lesson seems clear: eco-documentaries can’t compete at the multiplex. So why don’t they just ditch the doc bit altogether? Why not bite the bullet and spread the message via the medium of the blockbuster, as in Roland Emmerich’s eco-disaster film The Day After Tomorrow?

The main stumbling block seems to be Hollywood. In mainstream cinema, big bangs rule. Road movies rock. Nature is, by and large, an unpredictable enemy, to be tamed, not saved. Fireballs are awesome – when they’re caused by an exploding helicopter. Rock crevices are dramatic – when you nip across them on a rope bridge. The most chilled-out surfing flick only climaxes once that wave has been mastered.

Even films with such apparently impeccable eco-credentials as, say, Wall-E, Pixar’s comedy about a world desiccated by overconsumption, look, on closer inspection, like red herrings of a new green wave. Film-makers can’t really get away with films that don’t chime with what children are taught in school. And it’s worth remembering that the film Pixar made before Wall-E was Cars, a hymn to all things auto, whose climatic act of redemption involves road resurfacing.

It’s peculiar, says film theorist Christopher Frayling. “One of the staples of cinema is fear. You would have thought you could prey on that,” he says. “In the 30s people were worried about maverick scientists cooking up something nasty in their garrets. In the 50s it was a nuclear worry, in the 70s it was volcanoes and earthquakes, and recently we’ve had films like The Matrix about a parallel digital universe. Yet no one has yet found a successful idiom for making us feel anxious about the environment.”

Previous attempts act as a heavy disincentive: they’re either embarrassing, like last year’s remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, which turned the nuclear threat of the 1951 original into an ecological one, or catastrophic, like Kevin Costner’s Waterworld. And when film-makers have tried, they’ve bottled it. Danny Boyle’s provocative Sunshine morphed into a standard maniac-in-space horror two-thirds of the way through. The Day After Tomorow and I Am Legend showed us that however close the human race comes to extinction, we will pull through in the end. It’s dangerous – by indulging our hopes, cinema may well be adding to our difficulties, helping us kid ourselves.

This brings us to The Road, John Hillcoat’s forthcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s bleak, post-apocalyptic horror novel. After a troubled production, it finally arrives in the UK in January, complete with moderately hopeful conclusion, including a final image one colleague described as a “cheesy freeze-frame”. Quite different, then, from the end of the book – perhaps the most nihilistic, and most important, literary exploration of a post-climate change world.

So, does one throw up one’s hands and curse those damned studios for their avarice, their cowardice? No. Films function in a different way to books. You don’t read a book on a date. You might go and see The Road, however – and so an ending that doesn’t leave you wanting to jump off a cliff is part of the deal when you buy your ticket.

And that’s where Louie Psihoyos thinks he’s cracked it. “The Cove is the ultimate date movie,” he says. “I think that at the movies, women like to feel, and guys to be excited. Just about everyone likes this movie, and it’s one you won’t struggle to talk about over supper.” And, praise be, he’s right. Unless you’ve ordered sushi.

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Destroyed by rising carbon levels, acidity, pollution, algae, bleaching and El Niño, coral reefs require a dramatic change in our carbon policy to have any chance of survival

Animal, vegetable and mineral, a pristine tropical coral reef is one of the natural wonders of the world. Bathed in clear, warm water and thick with a psychedelic display of fish, sharks, crustaceans and other sea life, the colourful coral ramparts that rise from the sand are known as the rainforests of the oceans.

And with good reason. Reefs and rainforests have more in common than their beguiling beauty and bewildering biodiversity. Both have stood for millions of years, and yet both are poised to disappear.

If you thought you had heard enough bad news on the environment and that the situation could not get any worse, then steel yourself. Coral reefs are doomed. The situation is virtually hopeless. Forget ice caps and rising sea levels: the tropical coral reef looks like it will enter the history books as the first major ecosystem wiped out by our love of cheap energy.

Today, a report from the Australian government agency that looks after the nation’s emblematic Great Barrier Reef reported that “the overall outlook for the reef is poor and catastrophic damage to the ecosystem may not be averted”. The Great Barrier Reef is in trouble, and it is not the only one.

Within just a few decades, experts are warning, the tropical reefs strung around the middle of our planet like a jewelled corset will reduce to rubble. Giant piles of slime-covered rubbish will litter the sea bed and spell in large distressing letters for the rest of foreseeable time: Humans Were Here.

“The future is horrific,” says Charlie Veron, an Australian marine biologist who is widely regarded as the world’s foremost expert on coral reefs. “There is no hope of reefs surviving to even mid-century in any form that we now recognise. If, and when, they go, they will take with them about one-third of the world’s marine biodiversity. Then there is a domino effect, as reefs fail so will other ecosystems. This is the path of a mass extinction event, when most life, especially tropical marine life, goes extinct.”

Alex Rogers, a coral expert with the Zoological Society of London, talks of an “absolute guarantee of their annihilation”. And David Obura, another coral heavyweight and head of CORDIO East Africa, a research group in Kenya, is equally pessimistic: “I don’t think reefs have much of a chance. And what’s happening to reefs is a parable of what is going to happen to everything else.”

These are desperate words, stripped of the usual scientific caveats and expressions of uncertainty, and they are a measure of the enormity of what’s happening to our reefs.

The problem is a new take on a familiar evil. Of the billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide spewed from cars, power stations, aircraft and factories each year, about half hangs round in the thin layer of atmosphere where it traps heat at the Earth’s surface and so drives global warming. What happens to the rest of this steady flood of carbon pollution? Some is absorbed by the world’s soils and forests, offering vital respite to our overcooked climate. The remainder dissolves into the world’s oceans. And there, it stores up a whole heap of trouble for coral reefs.

Often mistaken for plants, individual corals are animals closely related to sea anemones and jellyfish. They have tiny tentacles and can sting and eat fish and small animals. Corals are found throughout the world’s oceans, and holidaymakers taking a swim off the Cornish coast may brush their hands through clouds of the tiny creatures without ever realising.

It is when corals form communities on the sea bed that things get interesting. Especially in the tropics. Yes, Britain has its own rugged coral reefs, but such deep-water constructions are too remote, cold and dark to really fire the imagination. It is in shallow, brightly light waters, that coral reefs really come to life. In the turquoise waters of the Caribbean, Indian Ocean and Pacific, the coral come together with tiny algae to make magic.

The algae do something that the coral cannot. They photosynthesise, and so use the sun’s energy to churn out food for the coral. In return, the coral provide the algae with the carbon dioxide they need for photosynthesis, and so complete the circle of symbiotic life.

Freed of the need to wave their tentacles around to hunt for food, the coral can devote more energy to secreting the mineral calcium carbonate, from which they form a stony exoskeleton. A second type of algae, which also produces calcium carbonate, provides cement. Together, the marine menage-a-trois make a very effective building site, with dead corals leaving their calcium skeletons behind as limestone. For all their apparent beauty and fragility, just think of coral reefs as big lumps of rock with a living crust.

A fragile crust too. The natural world is a harsh environment for coral reefs. They are under perpetual attack by legions of fish that graze their fields of algae. Animals bore into their shells to make homes, and storms and crashing waves break them apart. They may appear peaceful paradises, but most coral reefs are manic sites of constant destruction and frantic rebuilding. Crucially though, for millions of years, these processes have been in balance.

Human impact has tipped that balance. Loaded with the agricultural nutrients nitrates and phosphates, rivers now spill their polluted waters into the sea. Sediment and sewage cloud the clear waters, while over-fishing plays havoc with the finely tuned community of fish and sharks that kept the reef nibbling down to sustainable levels. All of this is enough to wreck coral without any help from climate change.

Global warming, predictably, has made the situation worse. Secure in their tropical currents, coral reefs have evolved to operate within a fairly narrow temperature range, yet, in the late 1970s and 1980s, coral scientists got an unpleasant demonstration of what happens when the hot tap is left on too long. “The algae go berserk,” said Rogers. Scientists think the algae react to the warmer water and increased sunlight by producing toxic oxygen compounds called superoxides, which can damage the coral. The coral respond by ejecting their algal lodgers, leaving the reefs starved of nutrients and deathly white. Such bleaching was first observed on a large scale in the 1980s, and reached massive levels worldwide during the 1997-98 El Niño weather event.

On top of a human-warmed climate, the 1997-98 El Niño, caused by pulses of warming and cooling in the Pacific, drove water temperatures across the world beyond the coral comfort zone. The mass bleaching event that followed killed a fifth of coral communities worldwide, and though many have recovered slightly since, the global death toll attributed to the 1997-98 mass bleaching stands at 16%. “At the moment the reefs seem to be recovering well but it’s only a matter of time before we have another [mass bleaching event],” says Obura.

With its striking images of skeletal reefs stripped of colour and life, coral bleaching offers photogenic evidence of our crumbling biodiversity, and has placed the plight of coral reefs higher on the world’s consciousness. Head along to your local swimming pool for diving lessons these days, and chances are that you will be offered a coral conservation course as well.

Katy Bloor, an instructor at Sub-Mission Dive School in Stoke-on-Trent, says many divers are not aware of the problems corals face, particularly as holiday operators tend to visit reefs in better condition. “Most have probably dived on a coral reef that they thought was a bit rubbish, but they haven’t considered why,” she said.

If anyone knows what they are missing out on, it should be Charlie Veron. So what does it feel like to dive on a pristine reef? “I have not seen many reefs that can be called pristine, and none exist now,” he says. “But if I had to take a punt, I was diving on the Chesterfield Reefs, east of New Caledonia [in the southwest Pacific] about 30 years ago and was staggered by the wealth of life, especially big fish which were so thick that I was hardly ever able to photograph coral. That place made even remote parts of the Great Barrier Reef look second rate.

“I can only describe it like walking through a rainforest dripping with orchids, crowded with birds and mammals of bewildering variety and trees growing in extreme profusion.”

Can the coral be helped? If planting more trees can regrow a forest, can coral be introduced to bolster failing reefs? There are a handful of groups working on the problem, many of which have reported encouraging results. Off Japan, scientists are farming healthy coral on hundreds of ceramic discs, which they plan to transplant onto the badly-bleached Sekisei Lagoon reef within two years. In 30 years or so, they hope the reef can recover fully.

A similar, if more low-tech, exercise is under way in the Philippine coastal community of Bolinao, where local people have broken off chunks from the healthy section of their local reef and have crudely wedged them into cracks in bleached sections. Others have cultured corals in swimming pools, and researchers in the Maldives are using giant sunken cages, connected to a low level electric current, to help coral form their chalky shells.

But the problem with all these efforts, according to Rogers at the ZSL, is that they cannot address the looming holocaust that reefs face. A new, terrible curse that comes on top of the bleaching, the battering, the poisoning and the pollution.

Remember the carbon dioxide that we left dissolving in the oceans? Billions and billions of tonnes of it over the last 150 years or so since the industrial revolution? While mankind has squabbled, delayed, distracted and dithered over the impact that carbon emissions have on the atmosphere, that dissolved pollution has been steadily turning the oceans more acidic. There is no dispute, no denial, about this one. Chemistry is chemistry, and carbon dioxide plus water has made carbonic acid since the dawn of time.

As a result, the surface waters of the world’s oceans have dropped by about 0.1 pH unit – a sentence that proves the hopeless inadequacy of scientific terminology to express certain concepts. It sounds small, but is a truly jaw-dropping change for coral reefs.

For reefs to rebuild their stony skeletons, they rely on the seawater washing over them to be rich in the calcium mineral aragonite. Put simply, the more acid the seawater, the less aragonite it can hold, and the less corals can rebuild their structure. Earlier this year, a paper in the journal Science reported that calcification rates across the Great Barrier Reefs have dropped 14% since 1990. The researchers said more acidic seas were the most likely culprit, and ended their sober write-up of the study with the extraordinary warning that it showed “precipitous changes in the biodiversity and productivity of the world’s oceans may be imminent”.

Rogers says carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are already over the safe limits for coral reefs. And even the most ambitious political targets for carbon cuts, based on limiting temperature rise to 2C, are insufficient. Their only hope, he says, is a long-term carbon concentration much lower than today’s. The clock must somehow be wound back and carbon somehow sucked out of the air. If not, then so much more carbon will dissolve in the seas that the reefs will surely crumble to dust. Given the reluctance to reduce emissions so far, the coral community is not holding its breath.

“I just don’t see the world having the commitment to sort this one out,” says Obura. “We need to use the coral reef lesson to wake us up and not let this happen to a hundred other ecosystems.”

Reefs to see before they die

Florida Keys, United States

The only coral reef system in the continental US and the third largest in the world, stretching 221 miles down the Florida coast. The US National Marine Fisheries Service says live coral is down 50-80% in the last decade, mainly due to damage by humans.

Jamaican reefs

Threatened by sewage disposal, inland agricultural run-off and eutrophication, as well as tourist activities such as glass-bottom boat trips. Hurricanes hinder reef recovery and Caribbean coral cover has declined 80% in 25 years.

Scarborough Reef, South China Sea

Ownership disputes between the Philippines, mainland China and Taiwan mean the waters surrounding this reef are heavily overfished, and mangled by the blasts and cyanide used to maximise catch.

Reefs of the windward Southeast Hawaiian Islands, US

Management is improving around the main Hawaiian islands such as Oahu and Maui, but over-fishing and organic sediment from plantations remain major threats.

Seribu Islands, Java Sea, Indonesia

Spanning over 108,000 hectares and 100 small islands, this reef is a significant contributor to the Indonesian tourism economy. Rapid urban development poses threats from domestic and industrial waste, urban run-off and oil and gas exploration. The 1997-1998 El Niño event triggered severe bleaching and killed over 90% of the coral down to 25 metres.

Stable but for how long?

The Great Barrier Reef

The globe’s largest coral reef ecosystem, composed of over 2,900 individual reefs and stretching over 3,000km, is the best example of reef management with little damage since 2004. Significant bleaching occurred in 1998, 2002 and 2006.

The Red Sea Riviera, Gulf of Aqaba, Egypt, Israel and Jordan

These reefs continue to remain in good health despite intense tourism. Coral cover remains high to very high, despite localised losses from coral bleaching and crowns-of-thorns starfish, which prey on coral polyps.

Mombasa National Marine Park, Kenya

Adjacent to the most heavily populated beach along the Kenyan coast, damage due to tourism is inevitable. In 1989 the area was pronounced a marine park, leading to an increase in recorded coral cover from 8 to 30%.

Reefs of the Seychelles, Indian Ocean

Lost some 90% of coral cover during the 1998 El Nino event. Slowly recovering due to granitic coral, which is more resistant and supports regrowth.

Surin Islands, Thailand

The reefs located off this group of islands were weakened by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami The majority of the damage is localized and low impact, but the coral is now more susceptible to future destruction.

Lauren Smith

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