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Australia's Great Barrier Reef (and its A$5.8 billion tourist industry) will be "functionally extinct" by 2050, a draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned this week. This is due to rapid Coral Bleaching, accelerated by Global Warming, which is also endemic in the Indian Ocean and parts of the Caribbean. It happens when corals living at the edge of their temperature tolerance expel the tiny animals that live inside, turning colourless and exposing their calcium skeletons inside.

The Great Barrier Reef is home to more than a third of the world's soft corals, more than 1,500 species of fish and six of the world's seven marine turtle species.

Indian Ocean corals were even harder hit than Australia's in 1998, with 50 percent dying along its western rim in months.

The Maldives may disappear within generations, says their President, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom.

 "The average height of the Maldives is 1.5 metres above mean sea level. Therefore, if the rate of sea level rise per century is 59 cm, it would take a couple of centuries at the most to totally inundate the entire Maldives," he said in an interview with international news agency Reuters. "Our tourism industry will be affected for certain. The stretches of white sandy beaches are one of the main assets of our tourism industry," Of the archipelago's 1,192 islands and atolls, 194 are inhabited - and the beaches on 60 percent of those are already facing varying degrees of erosion.

 "My message is a simple one -- take global warming and climate change more seriously. Act now, before it becomes too late to save not only the low-lying islands but the entire planet."

Mexico: Air pollution on Mexico's Gulf coast threatens to erase carved stone murals at the pre-Aztec ruined city of El Tajin. It is famous for its intricate reliefs, some showing an ancient ball game sometimes compared to basketball. UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1992.

Air pollution specialist Humberto Bravo from Mexico's UNAM university said acid levels in the air around El Tajin, in the oil-producing Veracruz state, were among the highest in Mexico.

"If nothing is done, within 10, 20 or 100 years, the hieroglyphics will disappear."

Even British holiday magnets are in trouble. "Shifting Shores", a report prepared for the National Trust, which owns 10% of Britain’s coastline, and much of the most dramatic, says that rising sea levels could damage more than 600 km over the next century; and houses, farmland, lighthouses and sand dunes will be submerged as climate change and rising seas increase the erosion. More than 4,000 hectares of Trust land could flood.

"The coast is a canary for climate change," the report said.

"It shows how the effects are happening today and close to home. Sea-level rise and climate change are forecast to increase the scale and pace of coastal change."

Beauty spots under threat include:

• Golden Cap, Dorset. The highest point on the south coast could see erosion increase to more than two metres a year.

• Formby Sands in Lancashire could recede by more than 400 metres.

• Birling Gap, Sussex. Erosion has already destroyed several cottages on the edge of the chalk cliffs. The remaining houses and a hotel are under threat.

• Studland Peninsula, Dorset. The southern part of the beach is losing up to three metres each year.

Well, there’s always going to be somewhere else, eh...

If seas rise as little as 1 metre this century, as forecast in some scientific models:

A quarter of the Nile Delta in Egypt would be underwater.

Coastal Vietnam, Mauritania, Suriname, Guyana, French Guiana, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, the Bahamas and Benin would aloso be in big trouble. About 56 million people in 84 developing countries would lose their homes.

These are among the predictions of a report on the impact of sea level rise on developing countries prepared by a World Bank economist, Susmita Dasgupta.

Lake Chad is shrinking because of poor rainfall, itself the consequence of climate change. Once Africa's third largest body of water, back in the early 1960s, the lake, which as well as Chad borders Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon, covered about 25,000 square km.  It now covers much less than a tenth of that, further endangered by a fast-expanding human population that squeezes its natural resources.

Local people used to see the shrinking of the lake as cyclical – but now they’re not so sure...

And some places it’s happening now:

Climate change has contributed to extreme weather conditions that have lead to catastrophic flooding in the Indonesian capital Jakarta, said a deputy environment minister, Masnellyarty Hilman. The floods have submerged huge areas in the city and its surroundings, killed 50 people and displaced hundreds of thousands. Warmer seas heated up the monsoon winds that carry moisture from the ocean to the land, making for extra heavy rain. Indonesian authorities are waiting for the floods to subside so they can continue the cull of backyard poultry thought to be a possible cause of the H5N1 strain of bird flu which has appeared across eastern Asia.