Chasing Coral (2017)

Chasing Coral is a Netflix documentary, so it's available on that platform, but it's also had a limited theatrical release. As I have a cinema pass and it was showing at my local Curzon, I opted for a big screen viewing of it.

I'm not a climate change denier, the current evidence (and in science it's always current evidence - that's no indication that I expect someone to come along and change their mind because they find DNA under the fingernails of the polar bears) points convincingly to human activities having a marked impact on the climate. However, it wasn't until I saw Chasing Coral that the actual impact really hit me.

Sure you can point to all the extreme weather as evidence of climate change - but we've always had bad weather and even though we've been getting more of it lately, it's hard to point to one storm and accuse climate change of responsibility.

Watching the bleaching (and death) of coral though is eye-opening. Particularly when the devastation is so immediate and so wide-spread. There's also an emotional impact watching this through the eyes of some of the crew filming one of these mass-bleaching events. At first the enthusiasm for coral, and the emotional response of the crew seems a bit overblown, but by the end of it I was fully engaged with their mission.

If you have a Netflix account, this is worth a watch.