Should birders and naturalists care about climate change? Here are a few key facts: shifting both eastwards along the winter isotherms and northwards towards their breeding grounds. These changes mean that some sites designated as being important for waterbird conservation hold fewer birds. Many more examples could be listed here, but the message is clear: Not only is there sound evidence that climate change is happening, but also that it is affecting the distributions of species on a large scale. Birders will have noted that migrants are arriving in the UK earlier in spring and staying later in the autumn, and that there has been an increase in the records of species that, 50 years ago, were rare or unknown in Britain, for example Little Egret Egretta garzetta, Black Kite Milvus migrans, Cetti's Cettia cetti, Dartford Sylvia undata and Sardinian Warbler S. melanocephala. The published papers from the BOU's `Climate Change and Coastal Birds' conference cover issues that relate most directly to coastal birds but that are also of importance to you. They deal with subjects such as how climate will change over the coming decades and how it is probably already too late to stop sea levels continuing to rise for over 50 years, even if the use of fossil fuel was reduced radically; how rising sea levels will change the shape of the coasts and estuaries, and affect the coastal plants and invertebrates that birds depend on; how the timing of arrival and distributions of birds are already