Our Changing Planet | Series 2 Preview (BBC One)

Our Changing Planet is an ambitious documentary series which follows six presenters, passionate about the natural world, visiting six beautiful yet vulnerable habitats, returning over a period of seven years to chart pivotal changes at a critical moment in Earth’s history.

In the second year of this unprecedented project, presenters Liz Bonnin, Chris Packham, Steve Backshall, Gordon Buchanan, Ade Adepitan and Ella Al-Shamahi will be in California, Greenland, the Maldives, Brazil, Kenya and Cambodia, exploring the ecological issues threatening the planet.

In this first episode we travel to three of the six locations with presenters Steve Backshall, Liz Bonnin and Chris Packham. Meeting the scientists and local conservationists fighting to make a difference.

Steve Backshall travels to the Maldives, a country facing significant challenges because of climate change. Warming seas and the acidification of the oceans have led to coral bleaching on a massive scale, globally. And increasingly unpredictable weather patterns could deal the final blow.

Steve returns to Laamu Atoll to find out about one such cutting edge project. Professor Steve Simpson and his team from Bristol University have identified that coral larvae, baby corals no bigger than a pinhead, move towards the sound of a healthy reef, a response that guides them to settle amongst a more biodiverse and healthier habitat and in so doing, add to the coral population.

In California Liz returns to California to investigate some surprising solutions for the relentless onslaught of the state’s wildfire season. California’s wildfires are becoming a yearly catastrophe with the state government spending billions of dollars in just the last five years to fight these out-of-control blazes.

Chris Packham is in Greenland to learn more about the effects of global warming and the rate at which snow and ice are melting and retreating in the Arctic. He travels to a science research station on the island’s remote Northeast coast, one of the most important locations in the world for the understanding of warming in the Arctic and its global impact.

Our Changing Planet returns Sunday 16th April at 7pm on BBC One.