He has travelled to every corner of the globe to photograph animals on the brink of extinction, in the hope his powerful pictures will call humans into action.

The result of an extraordinary multi-year project, Flach’s book Endangered documents the lives of threatened species from the Great Barrier Reef to Russia, Japan and the Galápagos Islands.

Flach spoke with The Saturday Telegraph from his studio in London, and says each of the 80 animals pictured in the book tells a story about the way humans are treating the environment. The veteran animal photographer of more than 30 years hopes his images will be a springboard” for positive action.

“I became interested in how we shape animals, how they relate to us and how we look at animals. The question is how we engage people with the natural world,” Flach, 59, says.

“I have been developing the book for over two years, and thinking about what would make humanity take action, and that is a great challenge.

“The book is all about touching the hearts and minds of people to actually care about the natural world, because our future depends on it.

“The pictures are about a sense of interconnection of the different stories being told. I wanted to find animals that are metaphors for something.”

Flach says it is not just a “catalogue of animals” — they each represent something about our world.

With only three remaining in the world, Flach has photographed the last of the northern white rhinos. There are two females incapable of carrying a calf and one male with a low sperm count.

We see the majestic monarch butterfly, whose milkweed crops are destroyed by herbicides, and hammerhead sharks circling off the Galápagos Islands threatened by the shark-fin trade.

“It’s also about the challenges of climate change, like the polar bears or a tortoise and the Barrier Reef,” Flach says.

“My book transports people to places where animals are on the edge of extinction. The saiga antelope, for example, is being hunted for its horns and exists in Kazakhstan to Mongolia and Russia.

“The Lord Howe Island stick insect is a great example. It was thought to be extinct for 10 years, but then was found on a rock and has now been saved in the Melbourne Zoo. It’s a case of lost and found.

“The stories are all based on what we’ve lost or what we are about to lose.

“It’s saying ‘look there is a wonderment here’, there is value in a world which has more mobile phones than people.”

Endangered will be published in mid-Oct