Nairobi, Nov 09: Global warming is threatening archaeological sites from Peru to Egypt as well as natural wonders such as the Caribbean's largest coral reef, a UN report said on Tuesday.
Heritage sites linked to thousands of years of civilization "may by virtue of climate change very well not be available to future generations," said Achim Steiner, head of the UN Environment Program.
Rising sea levels, more frequent storms, erosion and flooding are accelerating damage to heritage sites around the world, according to an Atlas of Climate Change issued on Tuesday during a November 6-17 UN global warming conference.
UNEP said fear of cultural losses, such as a Viking camp in Scotland at risk from erosion or rising seas threatening Alexandria in Egypt, was an extra reason for action to rein in a warming widely blamed on human use of fossil fuels.
"These are losses that affect us all," said Thomas Downing, co-author of the study that gave examples such as floods in the Czech Republic in 2002 that damaged concert halls and theatres or rising seas that might drown low-lying Pacific islands.
Floods in north-east Thailand had damaged the ruins of Ayutthaya, which served as the capital from the 14th to the 18th centuries. In Peru, a pre-Inca site at Chavin de Huantar in the Andes was threatened by melting glaciers.
And it said that the coral of the Belize barrier reef, part of the Caribbean's biggest, was suffering because of higher sea temperatures. Darwin, the British father of the theory of evolution, described the reef in 1842 as "the most remarkable reef in the West Indies."
"Climate changes are impacting on all aspects of the human and natural systems," Koichiro Matsuura, director general of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, said in a statement.
Bureau Report
