Climate change: five ways it could harm us

We think of climate change as a gargantuan global crisis that will transform our environment in ways we can barely begin to imagine.

Yet few of us appreciate how it could hurt us individually.

An expert report released today by New Zealand's leading body for science, Royal Society Te Aparangi, warns of a warmer world bringing heat waves, diseases, water contamination and air pollution.

Several degrees of warming this century could also have alarming implications for our mental health and social inequality - hitting Maori particularly hard. See more