One of the reasons humans haven’t taken real action on climate change is because it’s a problem that’s difficult to visualize. It’s very large in scope and many of its worst effects are incremental. So it’s tough for a lot of people to comprehend. And we don’t like spending money on things we don’t fully understand.

But this weekend (December 9), a video shot in Canada’s arctic has captured a scene of the damage that humans are inflicting on the planet by failing to act to prevent climate change.

It shows an emaciated polar bear on the coast of Baffin Island, in Nunavut.

The short film was captured last August by Sea Legacy, an ocean-conservation group that uses media to explain how humans are damaging Earth’s oceans.

One of Sea Legacy’s co-founders, Cristina Mittermeier, wrote about the video alongside a photograph of the bear that she posted on Instagram.

“My heart breaks when I see this photo,” she said there. “We cried as we filmed this dying bear. This is the face of climate change. A polar bear struggles to stand in his final days on the planet.”

It’s impossible to directly connect the circumstances of an individual animal to the global effects of climate change. But we know that climate change is melting Arctic sea ice, and polar bears rely on that sea ice to hunt. So it’s fair to describe a video of a starving polar bear as at least representative of the sort of harm that climate change can cause.

"The point is that it was starving,” Mittermeier told CBC News, “As we lose sea ice in the Arctic, polar bears will starve."