Environment: Wildlife feels the heat from our climate folly

Wildlife as well as people will be endangered by man-made changes in climate, two leading conservation groups will tell the Kyoto climate treaty meeting today. Nicholas Schoon, Environment Correspondent, looks at their claim that plants and animals are already giving early warning of a warming world.

Birds, frogs, butterflies and alpine plants are all telling humans about our species' potentially disastrous intervention in the workings of the earth's climate, say the World Wide Fund for Nature and Birdlife International.

They are convinced that in the coming century, the accelerating pace of change will become a real threat to flora and fauna, threatening thousands of species with extinction.

Many animals and plants have been able to cope with large, natural swings in temperature and rainfall in the past; they shifted their distribution. This time it is will be far more difficult because vast areas of potential habitat have been taken over by man for cities and intensively exploited farmland.

Migrating water birds may find the mudflats and salt marshes they rely on as feeding grounds disappearing beneath small rises in sea level.

Researchers have found that of 65 British bird species, most are nesting earlier than they were a quarter century ago - nine days earlier, on average. Also in the UK, frogs, toads and newts seem to be arriving at ponds to spawn a few days earlier than they did 17 years ago.

In the United States, a study of a butterfly species called Edith's checkerspot indicates that the southern edge of its range has been shifted 60 miles north as a result of an average 0.7C warming.

Any further south and conditions are too hot for the butterfly to maintain a population, but it has an alternative - moving upwards. If it lives on cooler high ground, such as mountainsides, it can tolerate living in lower latitudes. The scientists found these upland butterflies had, on average, shifted nearly 400ft higher.

Another study of 14 European butterfly species found nine had moved their range northwards by an average of 125 miles this century, three had stayed roughly put, one was expanding in all directions and only one appeared to be moving southwards. Research on alpine plants has shown that they are moving up mountains as higher temperatures climb up from below.

These are a few of the examples discussed at a scientific conference on wildlife and climate change in Coloradoearlier this year. Biologists believe some flora and fauna can act as highly sensitive indicators of climate change, responding to small but sustained alterations in temperature.

The findings from the conference are being released in Kyoto today by the international conservation groups World Wide Fund for Nature and Birdlife International, whose UK member is the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

The UN climate treaty negotiations in Kyoto are centred around what cuts developed countries should make in their emissions of climate changing greenhouse gases, principally carbon dioxide which comes from burning coal, oil and gas.

They end in the middle of next week, and have made little progress so far. The really serious talking starts at the weekend, when ministers arrive.