Climate change threatens protected areas

WASHINGTON, Dec. 11 (UPI) -- A U.S. conservation organization said climate change threatens the world's parks and reserves with species extinctions and severely altered landscapes.

The Conservation International study, in collaboration with the Universities of Wisconsin and Maryland, determined climate change, in some cases, will be so severe the resulting environments will be virtually new to the planet.

"We previously assumed that if the land is protected, then the plants and animals living there will persist," said Conservation International Vice President Sandy Andelman, lead author of the study. "That may be wishful thinking."

Nations in which 90 percent or more of the total protected territory might disappear globally or be transformed to novel climates, include Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guyana, Ivory Coast, Mexico, Niger, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Swaziland, Togo, Uganda and Venezuela.

"We urgently need to better understand how climate change will affect life on Earth so we can develop solutions and to do that we need consistent data about long-term trends at a very large scale," Andelman said.

The study was presented Monday in Bali, Indonesia, during the U.N. Climate Change Conference.