“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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.”
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
Proposal for ‘Hyperscale’ data centre in remote Northern Territory demonstrates need for urgent moratorium
SYDNEY, Wednesday 1 July 2026 — The proposal for the ‘Project Ares’ data centre in remote Northern Territory, which would be powered by off-grid gas and renewables, has prompted renewed calls from Greenpeace for an urgent moratorium, citing serious concerns about emissions and environmental harm.
The application for the project under the EPBC Act reveals the gas-fired generation for the project would be approximately 1,038MW at full build-out, which would more than double the NT’s current gas-fired generating capacity.
A recent report by Greenpeace Australia Pacific and independent expert Ketan Joshi, Energy Vampires: the AI data centres draining Australia, revealed how the frenzied rollout of AI data centres in Australia is set to derail the renewable energy transition, entrench gas and turbocharge climate pollution.
Solaye Snider, Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said: “Proposals like Project Ares, which would have significant off-grid gas powered generation and emissions, should not be moving along while there are still zero binding regulations to limit the impacts of AI data centres on our communities and environment.
“This hyperscale project proposes massive new off-grid gas infrastructure, making a mockery of the Federal Government’s unenforceable ‘expectations’ that data centres will cover their own power use with renewables. Communities will pay the price for the data centre industry’s endless hunger for energy at any cost.
“This proposal also raises serious questions about where this new gas would come from. Could it come from fracking the Beetaloo? Communities deserve to have the full picture before this project is approved.
“The Australian Government is asleep at the wheel when it comes to the rapid roll-out of AI data centres. We need an urgent moratorium on the construction and approval of new data centres, so our government can take appropriate time to legislate the regulations and safeguards we so desperately need.”
-ENDS-
Media contact
Lucy Keller on 0491 135 308 or lucy.keller@greenpeace.org
Climate Change
Can giant batteries unlock Africa’s green industrial future?
When Tropical Storm Ana made landfall in Malawi in 2022, it hit the landlocked country’s electricity system hard, destroying a third of its hydropower capacity and causing nationwide system shutdowns.
Even before the storm, Malawi’s power supply – generated mostly from renewables including solar and hydro – had been unreliable for many years, suffering from persistent outages.
The Malawian government is now hoping to improve the stability of its grid power with the construction of a battery energy storage system (BESS) in its capital that will charge up with surplus electricity generated when the sun is shining and hydropower dams are running, and release it when needed.
More than 80% of Malawi’s electricity comes from renewables and the country has been expanding capacity by adding more solar power while decommissioning 78 megawatts (MW) of diesel generation. But climatic impacts such as cyclones disrupt the grid and threaten to reverse energy transition gains.
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To ensure a more stable supply, Malawi is building the 20 MW/30 megawatt hour (MWh) battery storage system in Lilongwe with support from the Global Energy Alliance (GEA), under Mission 300 – an initiative led by development banks and their partners to connect 300 million Africans to electricity by 2030.
The project in Malawi aims to stabilise the country’s grid, smooth its intermittent power supply, and reduce its reliance on diesel generators, as well as averting about 10,000 tonnes of carbon emissions per year.
Battery energy storage systems act like giant power banks, absorbing clean electricity during periods of lower demand and releasing it for use when demand is high or generation drops. A typical BESS includes battery packs, inverters that allow electricity to flow between the batteries and the grid, transformers, and cooling and safety systems.
Damola Omole, director of the ‘Grids of the Future, Africa’ programme at the GEA, a philanthropic organisation, said BESS offers the “flexibility needed to smoothly integrate high levels of variable renewables” into the power grid. In doing so, it can reduce reliance on expensive diesel generation and protect consumers and industries from rising energy costs, he added.
Can BESS drive Africa’s industrialisation?
As calls to develop local green industries grow louder in Africa, Omole said there is a need to prioritise upgrading national grids with BESS so they can “transmit reliable, cost-reflective power directly to commercial clusters”.
While financiers previously doubted that intermittent solar and wind could meet the needs of industrial production, utility-scale BESS has demonstrated that renewables can deliver “predictable, steady output just like traditional fossil-fuel baseload power”, he added.

In recent years, African leaders, including William Ruto of Kenya, Felix Tshisekedi of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Emmerson Mnangagwa of Zimbabwe, have called for the continent to use the energy transition to drive green industrialisation and create value from its resources at home.
At a mining investment conference in Nairobi in April, Ruto said Africa had stayed at the bottom of the value chain for too long but would now collaborate to process its minerals within the continent. “We will refine them here and we will manufacture them here,” he told African ministers and business executives.
Kenya seeks regional coordination to build African mineral value chains
However, deploying energy at scale to advance this industrial ambition has long been a problem, while about 600 million Africans still lack access to electricity. BESS could therefore become a critical technology in the continent’s development drive, experts say.
Michael Iwu, West Africa business development manager at Empower New Energy, which finances and co-develops renewable energy, said BESS is challenging the narrative that solar and wind power alone cannot provide enough reliable electricity to run factories and other energy-intensive industries. Modern battery systems can now support business operations for several hours, helping maintain production during grid outages, he added.
For GEA’s Omole, the key question has shifted to how quickly countries can build the battery storage, grid infrastructure and market frameworks needed to unlock the potential of renewables.
BESS to help renewables displace fossil fuels
While BESS is still in its initial stages of deployment in Africa, interest is growing as countries look for ways to make renewable energy more reliable.
South Africa is leading with the largest and first of its kind utility-scale BESS on the continent. With the capacity to discharge up to five uninterrupted hours of power, the system is keeping homes and businesses running in Worcester, a southwestern town of more than 100,000 people.
Egypt is also investing heavily in battery storage. In 2025, the country launched its first utility-scale BESS, a 300-MWh facility integrated with a 500 MW solar plant in the southern city of Aswan. It has also committed more than $1 billion to strengthen its electricity grid and update regulation to support battery storage projects.
Africa needs more than export bans to cash in on critical minerals, experts say
Falling battery prices are helping drive the rapid deployment of energy storage. According to BloombergNEF, battery packs for stationary storage (used in BESS) cost an average of $70 per kilowatt-hour in 2025, down 45% from 2024.
Soon the role of BESS in supporting the grid integration of wind and solar could reduce reliance on fossil fuels and help the world meet ambitious climate goals, according to a GEA report released in April.
Stephen Nicholls, director of South-Africa based energy think-tank African Energy Futures, said the rapid pace of technological development and the falling costs of BESS are attracting growing attention.
He said improvements in storage duration could further strengthen the role of renewables in industrial power systems. While most commercial and utility-scale battery systems currently provide around four to eight hours of storage, Nicholls said researchers are developing units capable of storing electricity for extended periods.
“The cheaper the storage and the longer the storage, the more [BESS] will replace fossil fuels like gas,” he added.


Limited awareness and data
However, significant obstacles to BESS deployment still stand in the way of its massive potential. Iwu of Empower New Energy said limited awareness of utility-scale BESS, as well as concerns about financing and a lack of long-term performance data continue to slow investment across Africa.
Governments and developers need to build more pilot projects and demonstration sites to generate evidence of the technology’s value and benefits and boost confidence among investors and policymakers, he added. To scale BESS, we need to “keep amassing this [evidence] data and keep talking about it and exploring it,” Iwu said.
Two to tango: How governments can unlock private investment for national climate goals
To help address those barriers, Omole said a BESS Consortium under the Global Energy Alliance is working with governments, development banks and other technical partners to de-risk the sector for private financiers by generating evidence from early projects, mobilising public finance to attract private capital, and introducing policies that make battery storage commercially viable.
“This coordinated action helps African nations bypass legacy infrastructure constraints, integrate massive volumes of clean energy, and secure the reliable power required for large-scale industrialisation,” Omole explained.
The post Can giant batteries unlock Africa’s green industrial future? appeared first on Climate Home News.
Can giant batteries unlock Africa’s green industrial future?
Climate Change
With extreme heat now a public health crisis, local data can save lives
Eric Mackres is senior manager of urban analytics for the WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities and attended London Climate Action Week during the June 2026 heatwave. Usama Bilal is an associate professor of epidemiology and co-director of the Urban Health Collaborative at Drexel University.
As thousands gathered in London for one of the year’s largest climate gatherings last week, Western Europe faced its most severe heatwave ever recorded. The irony was not lost.
Across Europe, over a dozen countries issued urgent heat warnings and Spain registered significant deaths. In London, where air conditioning is rare in buildings and on trains and buses, temperatures soared past 36 degrees Celsius (97F) and schools closed early. The mayor announced the city’s first heat action plan – an important step.
Extreme heat is now a public health crisis for many of the world’s cities, as the urban heat island effect intensifies dangerous temperatures – and it’s growing worse. Around 500,000 people die from extreme heat every year. As global temperatures rise, and with a severe El Niño getting underway, even more people will die and be hospitalised unless cities act soon.
But most cities are still taking a far too one-sized-fits-all approach to tackling heat, looking only at temperatures and not its local effects on people and their health.
People experience heat differently
How extreme heat affects people’s health can vary widely across a country and city, depending on their environment and demographics. Cities can save far more lives and prevent more hospitalisations by taking a tailored approach, using data to understand who’s most vulnerable and directing solutions toward them.
The good news: better data now exists that enable cities to pinpoint who’s most at risk. And that data can inform customised adaptation strategies to save lives. Indeed, the future of cities will hinge on their ability to deliver solutions to extreme heat tailored to at-risk people and neighborhoods.
Comment: Climate adaptation in Africa needs investment, not imported solutions
First, cities should start by measuring heat’s risks to people’s health locally. Our work in Brazil and across Latin America shows big differences in what temperatures are dangerous and how quickly risks escalate at higher temperatures. These variations exist between cities, between demographic groups and between neighbourhoods.
But it’s not as simple as finding the hottest places. In temperate Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil, a person’s risk of death increases by 25% at temperatures of 27 degrees Celsius (81F). In tropical Teresina, in northern Brazil, which is hot year-round, the same temperature does not elevate the risk of death. At 32 degrees Celsius (90F), a person’s risk of death increases by a milder 10%.
These differences also exist within cities where the climate is the same. Elderly people, the very young, lower-income communities and those without air-conditioning and shaded green spaces are all more likely to get sick, be hospitalised, or die from heat. Areas with more trees and green spaces usually have lower temperatures, and therefore lower impacts of heat.
Targeted heat alerts
Second, cities can use this data to develop early warning systems and outreach campaigns that give people more targeted heat alerts. Research in the UK found that the elderly, despite being among the most at-risk, often were unable to heed warnings during the 2022 heatwave. Well-designed heat warning systems and city responses strengthen people’s trust in health services. They can change people’s behaviours and better prepare municipal services, helping reduce illness, hospital visits and deaths.
Rio de Janeiro adopted a heat alert system in 2024 with five alert levels based on past heatwaves’ impacts on health and forecasts of when temperature and humidity will hit those dangerous levels again. The alert levels activate services like cooling centres, extra public drinking water, and changes to outdoor events. When a heatwave struck during Carnival in 2025, the city was able to deploy resources to protect and warn people while still allowing events to go on.
WHO issues new guidance on heat-health action plans, as El Niño sets in
Finally, cities should use local heat data to target cooling solutions to where they can help people the most. Solutions like tree cover, shade structures and cool roofs lower temperatures and can provide targeted relief for the most vulnerable people, like outdoor workers and those who travel by foot, bike or public transit.
In Florianópolis, Brazil, we helped the local government use heat impact modeling to design a green corridor and urban forestry project that will reduce pedestrians’ heat stress up to 7 degrees C. In Hermosillo, Mexico, our researchers worked with the city and found that certain neighbourhoods could feel up to 14 degrees C hotter than the shaded city center. A park is now under construction that will bring better shade and heat relief to one of the city’s most at-risk areas.


Connecting health and climate planning
Momentum to address extreme heat in cities is growing, from both national and local governments. At last year’s UN climate summit in Brazil, the Belém Health Action Plan saw 30 national health ministries commit to build climate-resilient health systems based on local data and evidence-based policies.
And over 160 local governments joined the Beat the Heat initiative, committing to develop urban heat action plans and deliver passive cooling projects to reduce health risks.
But there’s still a disconnect between health, urban and climate officials. Only 23% of World Meteorological Organization member countries integrate weather information into health surveillance systems. Heat-health impact models, though increasingly easy to scale, are not yet built for every city. Some cities still need to collect local data for specific demographics and neighbourhoods – and many need support.
National and local governments will need to partner on this tailored approach. It will require integrating local heat and health data into public health systems, city planning, infrastructure, and disaster preparedness.
We have the data to know who will be most impacted by extreme heat when – and the solutions to keep people alive and out of the hospital. It’s time for governments to use them.
The post With extreme heat now a public health crisis, local data can save lives appeared first on Climate Home News.
With extreme heat now a public health crisis, local data can save lives
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