Climate change threatens world's iconic ecosystems

London, March 22: Without better local magement, world’s most iconic ecosystems are at risk of collapse under climate change, warn researchers. Protecting places of global environmental importance such as the Great Barrier Reef and the Amazon rainforest from climate change will require reducing pressures like over-fishing, fertiliser pollution and land clearing, they said. Writing in the jourl Science, an intertiol team of researchers warned that localised issues, such as declining water quality from nutrient pollution or deforestation can exacerbate the effects of climatic extremes such as heat waves and droughts. “We show that maging local pressures can expand the safe operating space” for these ecosystems, they wrote. “Poor local magement makes an ecosystem less tolerant to climate change and erodes its capacity to keep functioning effectively,” said the study’s lead author Marten Scheffer from the Wageningen University, the Netherlands. The authors examined three Unesco World Heritage Sites — Spain’s Do wetlands, the Amazon rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef.    (IANS)