Every second natural world heritage site is now affected by the consequences of global warming. Shortly before the start of the UN climate conference, UNESCO warns that by 2050 a large part of the glaciers will also irretrievably melt. Around 58 billion tons of ice disappear every year.
According to a study by the World Cultural Organization UNESCO, by 2050 the glaciers in a third of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites will probably have melted. The eternal ice will “disappear there, regardless of the efforts to limit the rise in temperature,” declared UNESCO. However, it is still possible to preserve the glaciers in the remaining two-thirds of the World Heritage sites if global warming is limited to 1.5 degrees compared to pre-industrial times.
For the study, UNESCO, in cooperation with the international umbrella organization for environmental protection, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), examined 18,600 glaciers in 50 World Heritage sites. The glaciers in Yellowstone National Park in the USA and on Africa’s highest mountain, Kilimanjaro, are most likely doomed to melt. In Europe, some glaciers in the Pyrenees and the Dolomites are likely to disappear over the next three decades.
The report is “a call to action,” said UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay ahead of the start of the 27th UN Climate Change Conference (COP27) on Monday in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Only a “rapid reduction in CO2 emissions” can preserve glaciers and the “extraordinary biodiversity” that is based on them. The COP27 plays a “central role” in finding solutions to the problem.
According to UNESCO, the glaciers studied are currently losing 58 billion tons of ice annually, equivalent to the combined annual water consumption of France and Spain and responsible for almost 5 percent of the observed sea level rise.
As the WWF published in a study in April 2016, every second natural world heritage site is now under threat. The greatest risk potential still lies in global warming.
