With 2021 set to be the hottest year on record, millions of people around the world will have their health, livelihoods, and lives endangered by high temperatures. This documentary explores the devastating impact extreme heat has across the globe, and tells the human stories behind climate change, from water shortages in impoverished areas, to people being forced from their homes to escape life-threatening temperatures.
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Robert Peston travels to China to investigate how this mighty economic giant could actually be in serious trouble. China is now the second largest economy in the world and for the last 30 years China's economy has been growing at an astonishing rate. While Britain has been in the grip of the worst recession in a generation, China's economic miracle has wowed the world. Now, for BBC Two's award-winning strand This World, Peston reveals what has actually happened inside China since the economic collapse in the west in 2008. It is a story of spending and investment on a scale never seen before in human history - 30 new airports, 26,000 miles of motorways and a new skyscraper every five days have been built in China in the last five years. But, in a situation eerily reminiscent of what has happened in the west, the vast majority of it has been built on credit. This has now left the Chinese economy with huge debts and questions over whether much of the money can ever be paid back. Interviewing key players including the former American treasury secretary Henry Paulson, Lord Adair Turner, former chairman of the FSA, and Charlene Chu, a leading Chinese banking analyst, Robert Peston reveals how China's extraordinary spending has left the country with levels of debt that many believe can only end in an economic crash with untold consequences for us all.
2014 • Economics
Adventurer and journalist Simon Reeve heads to one of the most spectacular countries in the world - Colombia. For 50 years, Colombia has been in the grip of a brutal civil war that has killed more than 200,000 people and displaced seven million. But in late 2016, a peace deal was signed promising to end the conflict and finally bring peace to the country. In this hour-long documentary for the award-winning This World strand, Simon explores Colombia at a pivotal point in its history. He travels into the jungle and comes face to face with the guerrilla army FARC, which is now promising to lay down arms. In the Pacific coast city of Buenaventura, Simon finds out more about the fearsome right-wing paramilitary gangs who now dominate the cocaine trade. As the FARC abandon the countryside, there is a fear that these groups will only grow in power. Travelling in the countryside, Simon meets the coca farmers who are demanding government support to stop growing coca and stop the flow of money to criminal gangs. With land ownership, poverty and drugs at the heart of Colombia's problems, it is in the countryside that the country's precarious future will be decided.
2017 • Environment
With 2021 set to be the hottest year on record, millions of people around the world will have their health, livelihoods, and lives endangered by high temperatures. This documentary explores the devastating impact extreme heat has across the globe, and tells the human stories behind climate change, from water shortages in impoverished areas, to people being forced from their homes to escape life-threatening temperatures.
2021 • Environment
Volcanologist Tom Pfeiffer and his team are embarking on their most daring adventure yet--visiting and photographing two remote Indonesian volcanoes, among the 20 most active in the world. Join a tense journey into the heart of one of nature's most dramatic and unpredictable natural phenomena, one that will test this experienced crew of scientists and native guides.
S2E1 • Volcanic Odysseys • 2016 • Environment
The launch of the BBC's ambitious seven-year natural history project, in which six presenters visit six of the planet's most threatened ecosystems to meet the people fighting to restore the Earth's delicate balance. Chapter 1: Steve Backshall travels to the Maldives, an area facing significant challenges because of climate change. Warming seas and the acidification of the oceans have led to coral bleaching on a massive scale, destroying the surrounding ecosystem. The biodiversity of the reefs provides food security, income and other benefits to the people of the Maldives, and Steve finds that they are working hard to try to stem the tide of destruction. He also goes diving off the reefs to check on a group of manta rays, whose presence offers a clear indication of the health of the reef. In Iceland, Chris Packham learns more about the effects of global warming. Temperatures in the Arctic are rising at more than twice the annual global average. Snow and ice are melting at an increasing rate, which contributes to rising sea levels and is likely to provoke extreme temperature events beyond the Arctic. As one of the eight Arctic States, Iceland is being dramatically affected by rising temperatures, with the lives and livelihoods of many islanders being threatened. Chris also discovers that melting sea ice is opening the Arctic to navigation. These seas are home to many species of whales, so Chris joins a team of young scientists monitoring the impact of increased commercial shipping on humpback whales. On the other side of the world, Ella Al-Shamahi visits Cambodia in Southeast Asia, an area experiencing increasing economic growth. However, growth is putting massive pressure on natural resources, with ever-expanding cities and devastating overexploitation of the natural world. The Mekong river is the lifeblood of this region, but whole sections of it are under pressure. Ella meets a fishing community living on the Tonle Sap lake. The lake used to offer rich fishing grounds for local communities, but the construction of many dams along the wider Mekong is now threatening to destroy the biodiversity of this once abundant lake. The building of new roads has given poachers easier access to forests, and the illegal wildlife trade is big international business. Ella visits a project in Cambodia that rescues and rehabilitates illegally trafficked wildlife, including pangolins, the most trafficked mammal on Earth. Chapter 2: Liz Bonnin travels to California to learn about the increasingly invasive wildfires hitting the headlines. Scientists can see clear links between the fires, climate change, raised temperatures and an extended drought season. There is one crucial element that is key to a sustainable future in California: biodiversity. Loss of keystone species and large carnivores is a threat to the state's ecosystems, and conservationists and scientists are mobilising to save wildlife from wildfires and to treat their burns. Liz also visits the Pacific coast of California, where warming seas have brought with them a new resident, great white sharks. With each shark consuming up to 18 kilos of prey at a time, the impact they could have on the marine ecosystem is being studied intently. Ade Adepitan travels to Kenya to look at the effects rising temperatures are having on the land. Hundreds of millions of Africans depend on rainfall to grow their food and keep livestock, and the capacity for adaptation is low. Ade also visits a project in Kenya that is going to extraordinary lengths to safeguard the future of its most charismatic creature, the African elephant. Over in Brazil, Gordon Buchanan discovers a pioneering project that is trying to save one of the Amazon's iconic predators, the jaguar. Brazil is the most biodiverse country in the world, and as well as the Amazon rainforest, it is home to one of the world's most important wetlands, the Pantanal. This area is home to high numbers of jaguars, but in 2020, wildfires destroyed 30 per cent of the Pantanal, killing an estimated 17 million animals. More than a quarter of the resident jaguars were directly impacted by these fires, through habitat loss, food shortages, injury and death.
2022 • Environment
The discovery of the San Andreas Fault and efforts to understand it are described.
S1E1 • How the Earth Was Made • 2009 • Environment
"Eighty percent of us now live in an urban setting, and I think that the solution to our environmental problems is not to say 'we've got break down cities and get everybody back to the land' – that would be disastrous – but we have to make cities our major habitat…we have to make them more in balance, I think, with the rest of the things that keep us alive." David Suzuki Cities are where most Canadians live. And, as we head into the future, how we adapt to the needs of expanding cities will have a huge impact on their livability. Food, land use, housing, energy, waste – how we tackle these issues will determine whether our cities evolve, or whether they decline. In a new instalment of Suzuki Diaries, David and his daughter, Sarika, set out to discover whether some of Canada's biggest cities are ready for the challenges of the future.
S51E14 • The Nature of Things • 2012 • Environment
A supermassive black hole is moving toward Earth at almost the speed of light. As it approaches our planet, its enormous gravitational forces triggers natural disasters larger than any the world has seen.
S1E2 • Doomsday: 10 Ways the World Will End • 2016 • Environment
From the global perspective of space, this 2-hour special reveals the breathtaking extent of our influence, revealing how we’ve transformed our planet and produced an interconnected world of extraordinary complexity. A journey through 12,000 years, Humanity from Space shows how seemingly small flashes of innovation have changed the course of civilization; innovations that touch all of us today in ways unimaginable to our ancestors. And we’ll gaze into the future at the new challenges we’ll face in order to survive as our global population soars because of our success. In every case we’ll look at our progression in a unique and surprising way, revealing unforgettable facts and "who knew?" connections. To visualize these stories cutting-edge technology is used to turn raw data into authentic moving images, building on expertise from a previous (and highly-praised) project; "Earth From Space." Using this technique, we can map humanity’s behavior in stunning, never seen before detail, revealing how our civilization grew, how it works today and what the future might hold.
2015 • Environment