'Heatwave' extracts from the Teachers' notes

The Broads is Britain’s largest nationally protected wetland. Its rivers, broads (shallow lakes), marshes, it a unique area, rich in rare wildlife habitats. Globally, wetlands are among the most threatened of landscapes and the Broads has some of the rarest plants and animals in the UK.

This is one of Europe's most popular inland waterways with up to 200km of waterways and over 40 broadsranging in size from small streams to big lakes like Hickling Broad. Once an essential transport network, today the waterways are used for re-creation. The Broads area attracts more than two million visitors each year.

The Broads Authority was set up in 1989, with responsibility for conservation, planning, recreation and waterways.

Heatwave was written for the Broads Authority for a tour in 2003,and has been updated for summer 2006. The show was made and devised by Nutmeg Puppet Company, who have been working for the Broads Authority since 1985, producing touring shows about ecology and social history. Shows are performed on the Broads in the summer holidays and in local schools during term-time. We believe this is a unique relationship between a theatre company and a national park.

This teachers' booklet has been created for the schools tour, funded by the Broads Sustainable Development Fund.

2. Story Outline

The show starts in the northern Thurne area of the Broads. Karl and Karen, two tour guides, introduce the place and some of its wildlife, revealing as they do so their very different attitudes.

An otter and bittern exchange opinions - complaining about the destructive way humans treat the environment. Later, up in the village, Karen and her neighbour Mrs Goose discuss the weather.

Karen thinks it's terribly hot and has a fan going. Mrs Goose says she's so cold she has the heating and electric blanket on.

Down in the marsh, Mrs Goose's son Billy discovers that he can understand the animals' languages and gets into conversation with a Spoonbill who used to nest here and has come to try again and a Bee-eater, blown off course while migrating. They too exchange moans about humans polluting and destroying their habitats decide to take Billy to Africa to teach him a lesson.

At Lake St Lucia in Africa, Billy learns that climate change is a global phenomenon as he sees how the water levels in the lake have been catastrophically lowered by irrigation for intensive sugarcane production. Billy is caught in a tense tug of war with a crocodile, and is rescued by the Bee-eater and Spoonbill.

Back home in the village in Norfolk, Karen warns Mrs Goose about the coming floods she's learnt about from the radio. As in the floods of 1938 and 1953, the sea has breached the flood defences and is pushing its way inland up the rivers and over the low-lying land. These are part of the changes in climate brought about by increasing fossil fuel use, but Mrs Goose puts her faith in the council sorting it all out.

Karen has the role of flood warden for the village. As the river level rises she first gives out sandbags and then as the water rises further realises that people will have to be evacuated. The Tench and the Daphnia in the river feel ill because of the increasing saltiness of the water and are then killed by it. Mrs Goose still doesn't realise the danger she is now in, Karen and then Billy try to rescue her from an upstairs window in their respective vessels. Billy is swept away on his raft by the strong current and has to be rescued by a human chain of children from the audience. A helicopter rescues Mrs Goose.

After the flood waters recede, Billy tells his mother about his adventure in Africa and about global warming and its causes, Mrs G decides she doesn't need the heating on, and Karen has given up her car.

Otter and bittern discuss moving inland to avoid future flooding - much easier for the otter who moves around a lot anyway. Karl and Karen plan to set up separate tours of the Broads next year and bicker about who the audience will favour.

3. Notes on characters and locations

Characters in order of appearance. Karl (masked actor) - a tour guide, specialising in bird-call imitations. Karen (masked actor) - his assistant - Amateur weather-forecaster. Bee-eater (puppet bird) - once rare summer visitor. Dragonfly (puppet insect) Otter (puppet mammal) - regular weekender with lots of 2nd holts. Enjoys seasonal trips to the seaside. (See below for more info) Bittern (puppet bird) - local resident. Finds it hard to adapt and not very friendly to visitors (who could be after same food). Knowledgeable about, and loves, the place and doesn't want to move further inland. (See below for more info)

Trev and Steve (puppets) - Two lager-louts on a boat. Mrs Goose (masked actor) - Lazy couch-potato. Lover of Electrical-gadgets. Billy Goose (puppet) - her son. Naughty, practical child. Ignorant but able to learn, though not keen on school. Spoonbill (masked bird) - A summer visitor. His family used to live round here, but couldn't stand the winters. Thinking of retiring to Broads. (See below for more info) Babel Fish (puppet fish) Crocodile (puppet reptile) - an uppity resident of Lake St Lucia. Asiatic Clam (puppet shellfish) - refugee from the cooking pots of Taiwan. Depressed River Mussel (puppet shellfish) The Daphnia (finger puppets) Tench (puppet fish) Air-Sea-Rescue Helicopter (puppet)

Background notes on some of the wildlife characters Bee-eaters - very colourful birds which spend the winter in Africa, south of the Sahara and breed all round the Mediterranean and Black Sea and into the Middle East. In recent years, a few pairs have overshot the normal breeding range and bred in England: in 2002, a pair bred as far north as County Durham. Like kingfishers, they are colourful and nest in holes in sand banks. Otter - Playful but solitary animals, which were almost extinct in Norfolk by the early 1980s as a result of hunting, poisonous farm chemicals and habitat destruction. Now in parts of East Anglia their numbers are recovering well. Bittern - Large, shy solitary birds, with superb camouflage. It is no wonder that the bittern in the show has a jaundiced view of humans: in the distant past we hunted them almost to extinction and, more drained their wet habitats and almost wiped them out again. Recently the outlook has been brighter: in 2004 there were 55 booming males in Britain - most of them in East Anglia. They are very good indicators of the general health of a reedbed. Spoonbill - between the 1650s and 1998 spoonbills did not breed in Britain. Now a few pairs are returning. Every year a few individuals spend the summer n suitable places along the Norfolk and Suffolk coast. The remarkable bill helps them find food in slow-moving, shallow water. As soon as the bill touches an insect or smallfish it snaps shut at high speed.This reflex is one of the fastest known in the animal kingdom. The Babel Fish - a strange animal invented by Douglas Adams in 'The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy'. If you put one in your ear it translates any speech you hear into a language you understand. Asiatic clam - Originally living in south and east Asia and Africa, they were first found in Britain in 1998, presumed to have arrived on ships. We don't know yet what effects they may have on water pipes and local species here, but they filter vast amounts of water so they may make the waterways clearer. Depressed river mussels - named for the noticeable depression in the shell. Throughout Europe they face serious threats, but the River Waveney has one of the three key populations in Britain (and probably the world) with more than a million individuals. Daphnia - the Broads cleaners - tiny but effective. They live naturally in freshwater and eat minute plants (algae), which would otherwise make the water green and soupy. They really hate salty water. Tench - a powerful,dark bronze, slimy kind of carp, living only in freshwater. It is a kind of dustbin fish - feeding on worms, shellfish, rotting plants and animal remains. It has no teeth in its mouth, but very strong ones in its throat, which it uses to crush clams.

Locations Most of the action takes place in the north part of the area around the River Thurne in the Broads but Billy and the Spoonbill do travel to Lake St Lucia - where Billy meets a crocodile. This is a large lake in South Africa, almost 400 times the size of Hickling Broad, the biggest lake in the Broads. It is in the middle of a specially protected wetland park about half the size of Norfolk. A recent devastating drought has shrunk the lake to 50% of its "usual" surface area. The effects of the drought have been made much worse by the intensive farming of sugar cane upstream from the lake. Water is taken out of the rivers to irrigate the sugar crop, so it never reaches the lake. The Broads and Lake St Lucia are both part of an international network of 24 of the world's most important and threatened lakes and wetlands, known as Living Lakes. Through this network the people who care for these places exchange information and skills to help and learn from each other.

4. Background information on some of the show's main themes

Climate change - the reality - its causes and effects The ten warmest years on record have occurred since 1983, seven of them since 1990. 1998 was the warmest year globally since records began in 1861. The Earth's climate has always been changing. In the past it was entirely from natural causes, but recent changes are mainly a result of human behaviour.

Greenhouse gas concentrations had remained fairly constant for over 10,000 years - regulating the earth's temperature at a pleasant 15°C. However, in the last 100 years our use of fossil fuels has upset this balance. As our vehicles and power stations burn fossil fuels they release more and more greenhouse gases. These trap the sun's heat and every year the "gas blanket" gets thicker. In as little as 70 years time, it looks as though temperatures in the UK may rise by as much as 3.5°C, bringing with them wetter and stormier winters, , hotter, drier summers and a rise in sea level of between 30 and 80 cm along the East Anglian coast.

Low lying coastal areas all over the world increasingly risk being flooded. No matter what we do now, climate change will continue. The time lag in the system means that the activities of our parents and grandparents have committed us to a process of global warming over the next 100 years. By 2025 we are set to be 1°C warmer than today, the winter will be 2.5 weeks shorter and the sea level around Suffolk and Norfolk will be about 15cm higher.

Rising sea levels - a bit of history The shoreline throughout much of Norfolk and Suffolk is moving inland, and has been doing so for centuries. This is a natural process which has been taking place as sea levels have slowly risen, and land levels have gradually dropped, the latter being the very long-term consequence of the glaciers' retreat north and west after the last ice-age. Coastal erosion is therefore nothing new. Well-recorded losses of settlements along the coast in the past few hundred years include Shipden (off Cromer), Wimpwell (off Happisburgh), Waxham Parva (off Waxham), Ness (off Winterton), and Newton Cross (off Hopton), whilst many of the present villages such as Dunwich and Aldeburgh were once very much bigger.

Floods of the past - historic floods in the area 1938 and 1953. In the show, Karen reminds Mrs Goose of the awful flood of 1953. This was the best-known and most devastating flooding in East Anglia when on 1st February, 307 people died, 24,500 houses were damaged and over 30,000 people were evacuated. In the countryside, thousands of animals drowned and great tracts of farmland were made infertile by the salt water. At that time there was no flood warning system and flood defence was organised by a number of river boards. Exceptional weather conditions, coupled with poor communications, meant that whole communities were not given sufficient warning of the advancing threat.

Sir Winston Churchill, Prime Minister at the time, declared the floods a National Disaster. There was a much larger invasion of salt water on the Norfolk coast in 1938 when, on the night of February 12th-13th, the sea forced a gap 600 yards wide in the sandhills and flooded 15 square miles with salt water, drowned cattle and left villages like Horsey, Somerton and Hickling standing like islands in a new arm of the sea. It took months to stop up the gap and the land took a good three years to recover from the flood.

Climate change and the Broads Sea levels are set to rise. The low-lying freshwater landscape of the Broads is one of the areas in the UK most likely to be affected and the biggest problem here is the increased risk of flooding by winter rains and sea surges. These threaten not only homes and businesses but many of the typical Broads plants and animals too. They cannot cope with saltwater, nor with being covered by water for long periods in the winter. Some species, like the otter, can move and willdo, others can't and they will suffer.

The Environment Agency works on carrying out Government policy on protecting and improving the environment. They provide maps showing flood risk, , they work at a policy level to prevent houses and businesses being built on floodplains and encourage people at risk of flooding to have a plan of what they will do in the event of a flood. They also issue flood warnings, and when a flood happens, they work with the police and other emergency services to help or evacuate people. Among their services to warn people about flooding they have developed ingenious systems such as vibrating pillows, which can rouse a deaf person from their sleep in the event of a flood.

The Broads Authority is looking to the future and have a Working Group considering the implications of climate change for the area. Currently 240km of floodbanks protect about 21,300 hectares of Broadland with more than 1700 properties, including more than 1000 houses. Most of the original material used for the construction of the floodbanks in the Broads area was silty clay and as a result many have deteriorated over time. Combined with changes to river channels, many are now leaking and in danger of being undermined and/or breached. Many floodbanks have also settled since they were built or last improved and are at risk of being overtopped by even fairly small tidal surges.

Various options were considered to improve the situation - including raising the existing flood defences, or building a barrier on the River Bure or Yare. However the choice was made in the short term for a £132,000,000 flood defence scheme known as the Broads Flood Alleviation Project (being carried out by Broadland Environmental Services Limited) designed to alleviate and manage (not prevent) flooding over the next 20 years. The project will maintain and improve the existing defences to prevent breaches and to put in new defences for some undefended communities. They are doing this in some places by making the floodbanks stronger and wider and in others by moving it back to allow the river a more natural course, and encourage an area of reed (known as a 'rond') to grow up between the river and the floodbank. In some places works are being undertaken to protect the floodbanks and the rond edges from erosion.

As well as all this action to "hold the line" the project is identifying areas where the riverbank could be removed to create new permanent or winter wetlands. This will of course mean new areas of habitat for wetland plants and animals to colonise.

The whole project is driven by the idea of making space for water in the Broads floodplain. In 20 years time the Authority sees the Broads becoming a more naturally functioning flood plain of extensive and connected habitats.

How long do we have? How much do we care? The work is based on a calculation of a 6mm a year rise in sea levels (the official level recognised by central government).

Other 'worst case' predictions have put sea level rise at nearer 16mm a year in which case additional funding from government w ill be needed to adapt the works.

In the longer term, sea levels are set to rise for more than 100 years.

How long we can realistically protect the Broads depends on how much we value them as an environment, and where the resources for protection will come from.

Theoretically we may have the technology and ingenuity to adapt to these changes in our environment, at least on a small scale and for a short time. But the problem is very large-scale and very long-term, and will need hard decisions to decide priorities.

Case Studies of schools who have reduced their emissions Chantry High School, Suffolk is a nightmare building for anyone trying to improve energy efficiency. Built in the 1960s, with flat roofs, metal window frames and virtually no insulation, it consists of ten completely separate blocks - each with at least two entrances.

With support from the School Energy programme and Suffolk County Council's Energy Efficiency Fund, they have replaced ordinary tungsten light bulbs with energy efficient lamps and installed new heating controls and better insulation. Early results show 75 per cent savings.

Needham Market Middle School, Suffolk have integrated energy efficiency into their development plan and school electricity bills dropped by £800 in the first year. David Richardson, Suffolk County Council's Chief Energy Officer, carried out a complete school energy audit.

As a result over 100 low energy lighting units were installed to replace the existing fixtures and heating controls were improved, all paid for with help from the School Energy programme.