Published

1 year ago

February 5, 2025

Alice Rush

“Natural” world heritage sites, such as the Galápagos Islands, Serengeti national park and Great Barrier Reef, could be exposed to multiple climate extremes by the end of the century, researchers warn.

The study, published in Communications Earth & Environment, assesses the impacts of extreme heat, rainfall and drought on 250 natural world heritage sites, under different warming scenarios.

Natural world heritage sites are areas recognised by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) for their “natural beauty or outstanding biodiversity, ecosystem and geological values”.

The authors find that, under a low-warming scenario, 33 of the 250 heritage sites will face at least one “climate pressure” by the end of the century. Under a moderate scenario, this number rises to 188 sites, they find.

Under the highest warming scenarios, the authors find that nearly all sites will experience extreme heat exposure, with many also facing the compounding impacts of drought or extreme rainfall.

The study warns that sites located at mid-latitudes and in tropical regions, which are often important hotspots for biodiversity, are likely to face the greatest climate risk as the planet warms.

Heat, rain and drought

Recognised internationally as the most important ecosystems on Earth, natural world heritage sites are legally protected under the World Heritage Convention, an international conservation treaty.

But, as the climate warms, natural world heritage sites are facing increasing threats from extreme weather events. In this study, the authors focus on extreme heat, drought and rainfall at 250 of 266 Unesco’s natural world heritage sites.

To assess exposure to climate extremes over the coming century, the authors use climate models from the sixth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6). They use four different Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), listed below.

SSP1-2.6: A “low” warming pathway in which global temperatures stay below 2C warming with implied net-zero emissions in the second half of the century.
SSP2-4.5”: An “intermediate” warming pathway roughly in line with the upper end of combined pledges under the Paris Agreement, which results in around 2.7C warming by the end of the 21st century.
SSP3-7.0: A “high” warming pathway, which assumes no additional climate policy, with “particularly high non-CO2 emissions, including high aerosols emissions”.
SSP5-8.5: A “very high” pathway with no additional climate policy.

**Case study: Ilulissat Icefjord**

*The* *Ilulissat Icefjord* is an actively calving ice sheet located on the west coast of Greenland, around 250km north of the Arctic Circle. It is one of the few sites where ice from the Greenland ice cap directly enters the sea.

*According to the* *world heritage outlook*, “climate change is the greatest current threat” to the site. It adds that “in the next decades there will be higher temperatures both in summer and winter, increased heavy precipitation (>10 mm), and around 2050 the distribution of pack ice will be noticeably decreased”.

The study finds that that site will face “no climate pressure” under the SSP126 scenario. However, it will experience “heavy rain” under SSP245, and will face both heavy rain and extreme heat under SSP370 and SSP585.

_{Credit: Realimage / Alamy Stock Photo}

The authors use the highest daily maximum temperature in a year to measure changes in extreme heat and the annual maximum one-day precipitation to track rainfall. For drought, they use an indicator that calculates the difference between rainfall and evapotranspiration (the transfer of water from the ground into the air through a combination of evaporation and transpiration).

The authors define a site as “being exposed to a climate extreme” when heat, rainfall or drought intensity exceeds a defined threshold by 2100, under any warming pathways explored.

The researchers established the “threshold value” for extreme heat, precipitation or drought based on the first 10 years of simulated data under SSP2-4.5 – a modest mitigation pathway where emissions remain close to current levels.

Dr Guolong Chen is a researcher at Peking University and lead author on the report. He tells Carbon Brief that the authors chose the intermediate SSP pathway to set the threshold because it “is a more balanced and realistic representation” of the climate than the other pathway. He adds that they decided to take a 10-year average “to reduce the fluctuations in model simulations”.

Mapped

The maps below shows which natural world heritage sites will face climate impacts under different warming pathways. The dots are coloured red if the site will face climate impacts from heat, drought or extreme rainfall by the year 2100 under low (top left), intermediate (top right), high (bottom left) and very high (bottom right) warming pathway.

Map showing the natural world heritage sites in the study. The dots are coloured red if the site will face climate impacts from heat, drought or extreme rainfall by the year 2100 under low (top left), intermediate (top right), high (bottom left) and very high (bottom right) warming pathway. Data source: Chen et al (2024).

The maps show that under the low warming pathway, the thresholds for extreme heat, drought or rainfall will only be crossed in 33 of the 150 sites. Many of these are clustered in south-east Asia. The thresholds are not crossed for any of the sites in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa under the low warming scenario.

However, under the two highest-warming pathways, almost all of the 250 sites are expected to be threatened by climate extremes.

The authors also find that a significant portion of natural heritage sites are already experiencing extreme heat, posing challenges to conservation.

The study shows that over 2000-15, 45% of sites faced extreme heat, according to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) ERA5 temperature dataset.

If global warming is kept in line with the low warming pathway, this number of sites experiencing extreme heat will decrease to 2% by the end of the century, according to the research. However, under all other pathways it would rise, reaching 69% under the intermediate pathway and 98% under the high pathway.

Compound extreme climate events

The study finds that drought and extreme rainfall will be a less widespread threat to natural heritage sites than extreme heat.

**Case study: Great Barrier Reef**

*The* *Great Barrier Reef* *is one of the most famous natural world heritage sites and the largest living structure on earth. The reef attracts* *two million visitors a year, provides jobs for around* *64,000 people* *and contributes more than* *$6.4bn each year* *to the Australian economy*

*The study finds that the reef will face an increase in the intensity of extreme heat events compared to the expected climate over the coming decade, under all but the study’s lowest warming pathway.*

However, the Great Barrier Reef is already under threat from climate change, as high temperatures cause “coral bleaching”, which can severely damage the reef. Coral bleaching events are becoming more frequent as global temperatures rise, and in 2024, the reef experienced its *fifth bleaching* *in only eight years.*

_{Credit: Ingo Oeland / Alamy Stock Photo}

However, the authors warn that the combined influence of temperature and either rainfall or drought extremes could be severe. The percentage of natural world heritage sites exposed to compound extreme climate events rises from 17% under the intermediate warming pathway to 31% under the high warming pathway.

Chen tells Carbon Brief that the study only calculates exposure, and does not “fully consider the varying vulnerability levels across different sites”. As a result, the analysis may not capture the worsening impacts of climate change for sites that are already under threat, he says.

Prof Jim Perry is a professor at the University of Minnesota’s department of fisheries, wildlife and conservation biology, and was not involved in the study. He tells Carbon Brief that this study is the most recent and “comprehensive” review of the impacts of climate change on natural world heritage sites.

Biodiversity threat

Natural world heritage sites make up less than 1% of the Earth’s surface, but are home to more than 20% of mapped global species richness.

As a secondary part of their analysis, the authors focus on threats to biodiversity in the most vulnerable natural world heritage sites.

**Case study: Pantanal conservation complex**

*Brazil’s* *Pantanal conservation complex* *area is a cluster of four protected areas, which together make up more than 180,000 hectares of land. The site represents 1.3% of Brazil’s Pantanal region – one of the world’s largest* *freshwater wetland ecosystems* *– and is protected due to its extensive biodiversity.*

*A combination of increasing temperatures, decreased rainfall and other human activity has led to an increasing number of* *wildfires* *in the region in recent years. A recent attribution* *study* *finds that climate change made the “supercharged” wildfires that blazed across the Pantanal in 2024 around 40% more intense.*

The study finds that the Pantanal will face “no climate pressure” under the low warming pathway, but that under intermediate warming pathway, heat and drought will both impact the region. Under high and very high pathways, only extreme heat will affect the region, according to the authors.

*It adds that “uncontrolled fires could be detrimental for the site’s biodiversity, landscape beauty and wetland ecological functions”.*

_{Credit: Zoonar GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo}

Chen tells Carbon Brief that the authors chose to focus on forests for this part of the analysis because they are “highly vulnerable to heat, drought and heavy rainfall due to their dependence on water”.

To assess the damage to biodiversity in forested natural world heritage sites to date, the authors use a metric called the “biodiversity intactness index”. This measures the average proportion of natural biodiversity remaining in local ecosystems. The authors class regions with an index of less than 0.7 to be “severely vulnerable”, and those with an index between 0.7 and 0.8 as “vulnerable”.

The authors identify 14 forested natural world heritage sites in the tropics with indices under 0.8 – mainly located in South America, the mainland in Africa, and on various coasts and islands. These include Brazil’s Pantanal conservation complex, Mount Kenya’s national park and Australia’s Ningaloo Coast.

The study finds that the mid-latitudes and tropical regions are likely to face the greatest climate risk as the planet warms. Lead author Chen explains:

“Tropical regions are home to rich biodiversity and diverse ecosystems, including vital natural land types such as forests. There is a more consistent consensus that temperature increases in tropical areas will have a negative impact on biodiversity, threatening the stability of these ecosystems.”

Prof Martin Falk is a professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway who has conducted research on world heritage sites, but was not involved in this study. He tells Carbon Brief that there are challenges to data collection for research on world heritage sites, noting that site managers typically “underreport climate change risks”. He adds:

“Another issue is that the natural world heritage sites in the Western world are over-researched. There is too little on the sites in developing countries.”

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The post Mapped: How ‘natural’ world heritage sites are threatened by climate extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.

Mapped: How ‘natural’ world heritage sites are threatened by climate extremes

Climate Change

Wondering How to Talk About Climate Change? Take a Lesson from Bad Bunny

Published

6 hours ago

March 21, 2026

Alice Rush

Discussing climate change can make a difference. Focusing on the impacts in everyday life is a good place to start, experts say.

By David Sun

When Bad Bunny climbed onto broken power lines during his Super Bowl halftime show, millions of viewers saw a spectacle. Climate communicators saw a lesson in how to talk about climate change.

Wondering How to Talk About Climate Change? Take a Lesson from Bad Bunny

Climate Change

Greenpeace response to escalating attacks on gas fields in Middle East

Published

11 hours ago

March 20, 2026

Alice Rush

Sydney, Thursday 19 March 2026 — In response to escalating attacks on gas fields in the Middle East, including Israeli strikes on Iran’s giant South Pars gas field and Iranian retaliations on gas fields in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the following lines can be attributed to Solaye Snider, Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:

“The targeting of gas fields across the Middle East is a perilous escalation that reinforces just how vulnerable our fossil-fuelled world really is.

“Oil and gas have long been used as tools of power and coercion by authoritarian regimes. They cause climate chaos and environmental pollution and they drive conflict and war. The energy security of every nation still hooked on gas, including Australia, is under direct threat.

“For countries that are reliant on gas imports, like Sri Lanka, Pakistan and South Korea, this crisis is just getting started. It can take months to restart a gas export facility once it is shut down, meaning the shockwaves of these strikes will be felt for a long time to come.

“It is a gross and tragic injustice that while civilians are killed and lose their homes to this escalating violence, and families struggle with a tightening cost-of-living, gas giants like Woodside and Santos have seen their share prices surge on the prospect of windfall war profits.

“We must break this cycle. Transitioning to local renewable energy is the way to protect Australian households from the inherent volatility of fossil fuels like gas.”

-ENDS-

Images available for download via the Greenpeace Media Library

Media contact: Lucy Keller on 0491 135 308 or lkeller@greenpeace.org

Greenpeace response to escalating attacks on gas fields in Middle East

Climate Change

DeBriefed 20 March 2026: Energy crisis deepens | Brazil’s new climate plan | New Zealand climate case

Published

17 hours ago

March 20, 2026

Alice Rush

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

This week

Iran war fallout continues

WORK FROM HOME: The International Energy Agency has advised its member countries to take 10 steps in response to the ongoing energy crisis fuelled by the Iran war, including reducing highway speeds and encouraging people to work from home, said the Guardian. It came after retaliatory attacks between Israel and Iran continued to destroy energy infrastructure in the Middle East, causing energy prices to soar further, said Reuters.

SUPPLY DISRUPTED: The IEA also said it is prepared to make more of its member nations’ 1.4bn-barrel oil reserves available to help ease the impacts of what it called the “biggest supply disruption in the history of the oil market”, reported Bloomberg. The outlet noted that Asian countries have been hit hardest by the shortages, caused by a “near-halt” of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

EU SUMMIT: The energy crisis dominated talks at an EU leaders summit on Thursday, said Politico. Arriving at the summit, Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez attacked other European leaders for using the energy crisis as an excuse to “gut climate policies”, according to the EU Observer. The Financial Times said that some European leaders have asked the European Commission to overhaul its flagship emissions trading system (ETS) by summer in response to the energy crisis.

COAL BOOST: In response to the conflict, utility companies in Asia are “boosting coal-fired power generation to cut costs and safeguard energy supply”, said Reuters. UN climate change executive secretary Simon Stiell told Reuters: “If there was ever a moment to accelerate that energy transition, breaking dependencies which have shackled economies, this is the time.”

Around the world

WINDFARM WINDFALL: The Trump administration in the US is considering a nearly $1bn settlement with TotalEnergies to cancel the French energy company’s two planned windfarms off the US east coast and have it instead invest in fossil-gas infrastructure in Texas, according to documents seen by the New York Times.
BUSINESS CLASH: Following “clashes” with the agribusiness sector, Brazil launched its new climate plan, which calls for a 49-58% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2022 levels by 2025 and includes “specific guidelines for different sectors”, reported Folha de Sao Paolo.
SALES SLUMP: Sales of liquified petroleum gas from India’s state-run oil companies have fallen by 17% this month due to cuts in deliveries to commercial and industrial consumers “amid the widespread logistical bottlenecks triggered by the Iran war”, said the Economic Times.
CUBAN ENERGY CRISIS: The US imposed an “effective oil blockade” on Cuba, leaving the country facing its “worst energy crisis in decades”, reported the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Chinese exports of solar panels to the island have “skyrocketed” since 2023, it added.
RECORD HIGHS: An “unprecedented” heatwave in the western and south-western US is “shattering dozens of temperature records” and could lead to drought in California in the coming months, reported the Los Angeles Times.
VULNERABILITY CONCERNS: Landslides that killed more than 100 people in southern Ethiopia have “renewed concerns about Ethiopia’s vulnerability to climate-related disasters”, said the Addis Standard.

1%

The percentage of England’s land surface that could be devoted to renewables by 2050, according to the long-awaited “land-use framework” released by the UK government this week and covered by Carbon Brief.

Latest climate research

Approaching international climate action by shifting the burden of mitigation onto higher-income countries could avoid 13.5 million premature deaths from air pollution in middle- and lower-income countries by 2050 | The Lancet Global Health
Beavers can turn the ecosystems surrounding streams into “persistent” sinks of carbon that can sequester an order of magnitude more than non-beaver-modified ecosystems can store | Communications Earth & Environment
Mobile-phone data from seven diverse countries during the summer heatwaves of 2022-23 showed a “widespread tendency to withdraw into homes” and an increase in out-of-home activities that can offer cooling, such as indoor retail | Environmental Research: Climate

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

Captured

Nearly_750_studies_have_found_that_climate_change_has_made_extreme_events_more_severe_or_likely

Carbon Brief this week published a significant update to its map of how climate change is affecting extreme weather events around the world. The map now includes 232 new extreme weather events from studies published in 2024 and 2025. Of these events, 196 were made more severe or more likely to occur by human-driven climate change, 12 were made less severe or less likely to occur and 10 had no discernible human influence. (The remaining 14 studies were inconclusive.)

Spotlight

New Zealand breaks new ground on climate litigation

This week, Carbon Brief speaks to experts about a first-of-its-kind climate lawsuit in New Zealand.

Earlier this week, representatives from two environmentally focused legal advocacy groups challenged the New Zealand government’s climate-action plan in court.

The plaintiffs argued that the measures laid out in the plan are insufficient to achieve the country’s legal obligation to hold global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures.

The case could be “influential” in shaping lawsuits and rulings around the world, one legal expert not involved in the case told Carbon Brief.

Reductions vs removals

The new case contends that there are several issues regarding the New Zealand government’s response to climate change.

One of the key arguments the plaintiffs make is that New Zealand’s second emissions reduction plan, which covers the period from 2026-30, is overreliant on the use of tree-planting to achieve its targets.

When the plan was released in December 2024, it was “immediately clear that it was a pretty lacklustre plan”, Eliza Prestidge Oldfield, senior legal researcher at the Environmental Law Initiative, one of the groups behind the legal case, told Carbon Brief.

The plan called for large-scale planting of pine tree plantations, which are not native to New Zealand and have a high risk of burning. Because of this, there are concerns about how permanent any carbon removal provided by these plantations actually can be, experts told Carbon Brief.

Catherine Higham, senior policy fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment who was not involved in the case, said:

“The lawyers are arguing that there are real challenges with equating the emissions that you may be able to remove from the atmosphere through afforestation with actual emissions reductions, which are much more certain.”

‘Global dialogue’

While other climate lawsuits elsewhere in the world have also focused on the inadequacy of a government’s plan to meet its stated emissions-reduction targets, this is the first such case that addresses the role of removals head-on.

Lucy Maxwell, co-director of the Climate Litigation Network, told Carbon Brief that the lawsuit “builds on a decade of climate litigation” in national, regional and international courts.

Maxwell, who was not involved in the New Zealand case, added that there is a “real global dialogue” between, not just plaintiffs, but national courts as well. She said:

“[National courts] look to common issues that have been decided in other countries. They’re not binding on that court if it’s at the national level, but they are influential.”

Given that many other countries have legal frameworks requiring their governments to create plans outlining the pathway to their long-term climate targets, Prestidge Oldfield told Carbon Brief that other jurisdictions “should be interested in these questions around the level of certainty”.

Higham noted that, even if the case is successful, addressing the plan’s shortfalls will face its own set of challenges. She told Carbon Brief:

“A lot of these decisions are political and they can be politically contentious…Those [measures] have to be put into action through legislation and that is then subject to the usual political process. So that’s where the challenge comes in.”

While she could not speculate on the outcome of the case, Prestidge Oldfield said it was “very heartening” to see that both the judge and the opposing counsel “appreciated how much of a concern climate change is globally”.

She added:

“It’s not a given that the judge would even be interested in climate change.”

Watch, read, listen

COMMON APPROACH: The Heated podcast analysed fossil-fuel advertisements and highlighted the most common deception tactics they employed.

THREAT ASSESSMENT: Mongabay mapped the potential threat that oil extraction poses to Venezuela’s ecosystems, including the Amazon rainforest and its coral reefs.

SALT LAKES? GREAT!: High Country News interviewed journalist Dr Caroline Tracey about her new book on saline lakes – such as Utah’s Great Salt Lake – the threats that face them and what they can teach us.

Coming up

23 March-2 April: Third meeting of the preparatory commission for the High Seas Treaty, New York
24-27 March: 64th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bangkok
26-29 March: 14th ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization, Yaoundé, Cameroon

Pick of the jobs

International Centre of Research for the Environment and Development (CIRAD), IPCC chapter scientist | Salary: €3,200-3,750 per month. Location: Nogent-sur-Marne, France
Avaaz, chief of staff | Salary: Dependent on location. Location: Remote, with preferred time zones
Green Party, social media officer | Salary: £31,592-£32,192. Location: Remote or Westminster, UK

DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.

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