You don’t have to travel to a shrinking island or a bushfire to see climate change in action, says documentary maker Olivia Ahnemann, it’s happening in front of us all of the time.

Olivia Ahnemann only has to look at her backyard to see climate change happening. Born and raised in New Zealand and now living in Boulder, Colorado, she's been watching summer days turn hotter, winters warming, snowpack decreasing, and the land beset by wildfires and flooding. This year, the state's famous aspen trees turned bright yellow two weeks earlier than usual. As well as that, her parents, based in the Auckland suburb of St Heliers, send photos of themselves knee-deep in water when Tamaki Dr floods during storm surges and king tides.

It's all helped inform The Human Element, which will screen soon in Auckland and is available for the rest of New Zealand to watch online. It's the latest environmental film the Emmy Award nominee has produced, and has a neat hook: it focuses on the classic four elements of earth, water, air, and fire – four different lenses through which to view climate change.

"It's a really fresh way of looking at it," she says.

"It's about how humankind and its actions have had an intense impact on the environment, and how that is coming around to bite us in the tail. It's looking at our impact on the environment and how, as we change nature, natures changes us.

"We are trying to get audiences to connect the dots between what they're seeing on screen and what they notice in their own backyard."

James Balog Ocean levels are rising worldwide, but some faster than others. Virginia, US, is one of those places.

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The film has only been released in the United States so far, but comes to New Zealand for its first international screening courtesy of Simon Millar, of non-profit environmental thinktank Pure Advantage.

The film is directed by internationally renowned nature and fine art photographer James Balog, who founded the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), the most wide-ranging, ground-based, photographic study of glaciers ever conducted. He has been a US/Nasa representative at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen, and his 2012 film Chasing Ice won an Emmy and was an Academy Award nominee. The Human Element looks at environmental change through his singular lens, Ahnemann says.

"There's a real authenticity and uniqueness to his work, and it's been such a pleasure working with him."

The film follows firefighters in the American West, investigates air quality problems in Colorado, and meets a struggling coal community in eastern Kentucky, a community that has relied solely on coal mining and now needs to diversify its economy. That has a personal connection with Balog; his grandfather was a Pennsylvanian coal miner who was killed at the age of 63 in a work accident. It also visits Lumberton, North Carolina, a city that struggled with severe flooding from Hurricane Matthew in 2016. Two years after filming, the town was inundated again by Hurricane Florence.

"That just shows how these stories aren't getting fewer," Ahnemann says.

"They increase every year. When we were making the film, the deadliest and costliest fires ever were burning in California. Every year the superlatives get overtaken by the next event."

James Balog A smoke stack in Pennsylvania.

Ahnemann's family moved to the US from New Zealand when she was 10; her parents and brother have since returned to New Zealand, with she and her sister remaining in the US. Ahnemann began her film career when she was working as an assistant editor in a travel industry trade magazine, sharing office space with a film producer. She worked on a full-length documentary for PBS and was so enamoured with it that she decided to make film her career.

"It was all happenstance; I didn't study it, I wasn't trained, I just learned on the job with some amazing mentors and working with some incredibly creative people," she says.

Since then, she's successfully freelanced her entire career, moving from one film to the next, many with an environmental theme. She produced 2015's Racing Extinction and co-produced Academy Award-winning documentary The Cove, which argues for a halt to Japan's infamous mass dolphin slaughters. Nominated for an Emmy for that work, Ahnemann says it was her first real exposure to true environmental activism.

"I am an outdoor-oriented person; I live in a very nature-focused place and understand the value of the environment," she says.

"It's heartbreaking to see how much human activity has been impacting our environment and our climate. But I think the environment that you live in and what you see in your localised area is what sinks in."

Although her family weren't "diehard activists" when she was growing up in New Zealand, she recalls her father marching in Auckland to protest the 1981 Springbok tour. She says she's been fortunate in her career to feel passionate about the issues she's made films about.

"The animal issues films are really hard subjects to be immersed in for a long time, but it's also very motivating," she says. "They are telling stories about people taking action to mitigate these wrongs. They are undercover, trying to bring to light what's happening in some of these corners of the world.

"I myself don't do that frontline activism; I am not sure I have the will and guts to do it, but I hold in high respect the people who do. They leave their families and put their lives at risk and are truly out there doing the work. More than anything, it's what inspires me. We have to tell stories about this and let people understand what's going on."

One of the communities The Human Element includes are people on Tangier Island in Chesapeake Bay, Virginia. The island has lost 67 per cent of its landmass since 1850, with a mid-level sea level rise prediction expected to take care of the rest in the next 50 years. Despite this, 87 per cent of the island voted for climate change-denier Donald Trump, an obvious incongruity that the film explores.

"They are Trump supporters who are watching their island getting eaten away," Ahnemann says.

"They are dealing on a day-to-day basis with the impacts of climate change but are voting against their best interests by supporting Trump."

However, she says the film does its best to avoid picking sides, instead examining the impact of human-induced climate change on humans themselves. Ahnemann is confident it's achieved that; she even says a screening in Louisville, Kentucky, received a standing ovation (though Louisville is admittedly a part of Jefferson County, which is one of just two majority Democrat-supporting counties adrift in Kentucky's sea of 118 Republican areas).

"We worked hard at telling these stories with dignity and profiling communities in a truthful way, told by the people themselves; we tried to get away from finger-wagging," she says.

"It's a visually beautiful film and Jim's photography has a way of capturing people's imagination and emotion around the issues.

"I think what we hope people walk away with, particularly non-American audiences, is that they see these American-focused stories and think of what's happening in their own countries. It's remarkable to think that climate change is happening everywhere. It's not just happening in North Carolina on the tail of a hurricane; it's happening in large storms on the coast of New Zealand, too."

The Human Element is screening in Auckland on Tuesday, go to eventbrite.com for tickets. It can also be viewed for a limited time from October 9 at pureadvantage.org/thehumanelement.