Climate change and coastal birds

The United Kingdom, with its extensive coastline, low-lying land and internationally important waterbirdpopulations, is likely to be much affected by climatechange generally and by rising sea-levels in particular.Already climate change has been linked with earlierbreeding (Crick & Sparks 1999) and changing breedingdistributions of the UK’s birds (Thomas & Lennon1999). The distributions of some of the UK’s inter-nationally important overwintering populations ofwaterbirds are also changing as a result of warmerwinters (Austin