World's Protected Areas Threatened By Climate Change, New Study Shows

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The study also identified "refuge" countries where protected areas face minimal risk from climate change, including Botswana, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone and Somalia.


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Climate change will affect national parks, forest reserves and other protected areas around the world, in some cases altering conditions so severely that the resulting environments will be virtually new to the planet, according to a study presented at the U.N. climate change talks in Bali, Indonesia.

Scientists from Conservation International (CI), the University of Wisconsin and the University of Maryland analyzed the World Protected Areas Database with ten Global Climate Models and three different scenarios examined by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

They found that under the most likely scenario, more than half the world's protected territory is vulnerable to impacts of climate change, with some regions facing the disappearance of current climatic conditions by 2100 or a transition to conditions not found on Earth in the previous century.

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