ACTRESS Emma Thompson has joined a growing list of environmental activists backing a high-impact book of pictures by Ambleside photographer Ashley Cooper, Images from a Warming Planet.

Ms Thompson, star of many popular films including Love Actually and Saving Mr Banks, who won an Oscar and a BAFTA for Best Actress in Howard’s End, is also an outspoken campaigner on climate change and environmental issues.

After reading the book she wrote to Mr Cooper saying: “Sometimes pictures are more powerful than any words and at the beginning of a year that presages some disastrous decisions in the US that will impact upon us all, this book has become essential reading.”

The book of more than 500 images, which documents the impact of climate change around the world, was published last year, the result of a 13-year global journey by the top photographer.

Mr Cooper took thousands of photographs in key locations which illustrate the havoc being brought upon the natural world, and amassed the world’s largest collection of pictures documenting climate change on every continent, from the Inuit communities of the Arctic to the coral atoll islands of the Pacific Ocean. It shows the damage caused - flooding, glacial erosion and deforestation - by the world's dependence on fossil fuels.

The book was endorsed by Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron, MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale, who said: “This book is far more than just a collection of impressive photographs – it documents a massively important and concerning phenomenon that will affect us all. These images vividly show the effect which climate change is having on our planet, and serves as a wake-up call for us all to act before it is too late.”

And leading environmentalist Jonathan Porritt wrote in the book’s foreword: “This is a book about change. About the way the climate is already changing, and the way in which it will change even more dramatically in the future.

"About changes in peoples’ lives as they seek to make sense of weather systems that seem to have slipped those reassuring bounds of normality and predictability. About changes in our understanding of what’s going on around us, in our world views, in our orientation both to our current reality and to the future.”