Mahajamba Bay One of the largest of the remaining mangrove forests may drown. Mangroves once covered much of the coastlines of Africa and Asia, but these places where rivers meet sea under the shelter of swampy trees are under threat from a variety of human activities, including coastal development—despite providing valuable shelter from tropical cyclones and even tsunamis...
Amazon Rainforest Logging and fire have returned to threaten the Amazon Rainforest, which sprawls over 5.5 million square kilometers in Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Suriname and Venezuela, currently... Credit: Daniel Nepstad
Monteverde Cloud Forest This tropical rainforest some 1,700 meters above sea level in the volcanic mountains of central Costa Rica gets its name from living among permanent clouds. The humidity is often 100 percent... Credit: Flickr.com / Sarah Oosterveld
The fynbos This 90,000-square-kilometer strip of scrubland in the Western Cape of South Africa hosts a greater array of unique flowers than anywhere else on the continent. Its distinctive proteas, such as the king protea that is South Africa's national flower, evolved in the cooler climate of the geologic past and are therefore especially susceptible to rising temperatures, which may also bring increased wildfires... Credit: S. Molteno
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The Arctic Mysterious craters in Siberia, drunken trees in Alaska, gas plumes burning above Canadian lakes—all speak to the same thaw of the Arctic. This rapid warm-up in the Earth's northerly air conditioner will mean even faster global warming as more of the greenhouse gas methane enters the atmosphere and darker earth or open waters replace reflective white snow and ice... Credit: USGS / Steven C. Amstrup
Doñana wetlands Migratory birds in Europe face a host of threats, not least hunting traditions. Now pollution and loss of groundwater due to farming have begun to shrink these seasonal marshes in southern Spain, one of the last wintering sites for waterfowl in Europe... Credit: Hector Garrido / EBD-CSIC
The Ross Ice Shelf This floating sheet of ice in Antarctica covers 487,000 square kilometers and holds huge volumes of fresh water. It is also one of the fastest-warming regions on the entire planet, which puts it at risk of a meltdown like the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf back in 2002... Courtesy of NASA / NSIDC
Snows of Kilimanjaro Despite being one of the largest volcanoes in the world, Kilimanjaro has a glacier at its summit. Like mountaintop glaciers across the globe—whether in Peru or New Zealand—the iconic snows of Kilimanjaro are melting and will disappear if global warming continues at its present pace... Courtesy of Muhammad Mahdi Karim
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Boreal forest This vast global forest, dominated by conifer trees, covers much of Canada, Russia and Scandinavia. But as the northern regions continue to warm, the southern edge of the boreal forest will give way to grasslands, and the forest as a whole could shrink by half...
The Great Barrier Reef It's not just warming waters affecting the world's largest reef, which stretches 2,600 kilometers. It is also the acidification of the surrounding oceans. In addition, human pollution is exacerbating disease in the reef ecosystem, and dredging and sewage are burying sections of the reef in sediment and sludge... Credit: Courtesy of ESA / NASA
The world changes a little faster these days. As concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere tick up year over year, more and more of the sun's heat gets trapped. That heat affects the planet in a variety of ways: raising global average temperatures, melting ice, increasing downpours, lengthening droughts and more. And this global warming is already transforming some of the places humans hold most dear.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization keeps a list of what it deems world heritage sites: human-made or natural places of "outstanding universal value," from the Palace of Versailles in France to the Sundarbans mangrove forest in Bangladesh. There are more than 1,000 such places now—and many of them may be changed beyond recognition by global warming.
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