Stonehenge vs. the badgers
The catastrophes seem purposely made for Hollywood disaster movies: Venice sinks beneath a swelling Adriatic Sea, Stonehenge tumbles to the ground when the English mole and badger populations explode and their burrows weaken the Earth beneath the 5,000-year-old rock monuments.
These disasters are not certain. But they are, to varying degrees, possible. Across the globe, World Heritage Sites, some of the planet’s most precious places, are under a slow but potentially devastating assault from climate change, according to a United Nations report.
Of the roughly 1,000 World Heritage locations spread around the globe, the paper focuses on a comparative handful — a review of 31sites, in 29 countries, each of which may respond to global warming differently.
At the poles, glaciers melt, which in turn raises the ocean and threatens Heritage Sites such as Easter Island with erosion.
Climate change, as the report notes, is a so-called threat multiplier — it worsens existing dangers not directly related to climate.
Consider the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park, in Uganda, which is home to about half of the mountain gorillas left in the wild: The combination of climate change and tourism, UNESCO said, means the great apes are at greater risk of catching human diseases.
Man-made icons, too, are not spared simply by dint of their synthetic nature.
“As solid and invulnerable as the Statue of Liberty itself seems, the World Heritage site is actually at considerable risk from some of the impacts of climate change — especially sea-level rise, increased intensity of storms and storm surges,” according to the report.
The UNESCO report includes recommendations for governments and the tourism sector.
It is also aware that not all parties have the option to build $6 billion floodgates, like Venice has planned, or the $59 million that the United States, for instance, may spend repairing Liberty Island after hurricane Sandy.
“Can we save every lighthouse that is on an eroding cliff? Probably not,” said the Union of Concerned Scientists’s Adam Markham, the lead author of the report, to the New York Times. “So there are going to have to be hard choices made in every country.”