Environment correspondent, BBC News website, Copenhagen
 Acidification of the oceans affects marine life |
Acidification of the oceans is a major threat to marine life and humanity's food supply, Hilary Benn is to warn as the UN climate summit resumes.
The UK environment secretary will say that acidification provides a "powerful incentive" to cut carbon emissions.
Ocean chemistry is changing because water absorbs extra CO2 from the air.
Some believe this could be as big an impact of rising CO2 levels as climatic change, though it is rarely discussed within the UN climate convention.
The UN summit in Copenhagen, which started a week ago, is scheduled to conclude on Friday, when more than 100 world leaders will attend in an effort to agree a new global treaty on climate change.
'Really important'
The science has come to prominence only within the last five or six years, and most of the details were not available when the convention was signed in 1992.
"We know that the increasing concentration of CO2 [in the air] is making the oceans more acidic," Mr Benn told BBC News.
"It affects marine life, it affects coral, and that in turn could affect the amount of fish in the sea - and a billion people in the world depend on fish for their principal source of protein.
"It doesn't get as much attention as the other problems; it is really important."
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