Striking footage (镜头) recorded for National Geographic shows a dying polar bear struggling to find food on a land without ice or snow. The poor creature can be seen dragging its bony frame (骨架) across the rough land and searching for food in a bin.

Paul Nicken, the photographer who shot the heart-breaking footage, says the sight reduced him to tears. “We stood there crying—filming with tears rolling down our cheeks,” he said. They found the dying creature on Canada’s Baffin Island—an area that has seen an extreme reduction in sea ice because of global warming.

Nicken says that had he stepped in, it would only have deepened the situation. Instead, he filmed the bear’s slow, painful death and posted it to social media to serve as visual proof of the impact of climate change. “When scientists say bears are going extinct, I want people to realise what it looks like. Bears are going to starve to death,” said Nicken.“This is what a starving bear looks like.”

Polar bears are only native to the Arctic region and are one of the many casualties (伤亡) of climate change. They rely on the Arctic ice to hunt seals and are becoming increasingly threatened as the ice melts away.

The World Wildlife Fund(WWF) predicted back in 2002 that polar bears may face extinction for losing habitat. There are an estimated 25,000 bears left in the wild and most experts agree that unless climate change is controlled, they will all be dead within the next 100 years. “The simple truth is this—if the Earth continues to warm, we will lose bears and the entire polar ecosystem. This large male bear was not old, and he certainly died within hours or days in that situation,” Nicken wrote on Instagram. But there are solutions. We must begin putting the Earth—our home—first.