New Study Forecasts That Half of the World’s Beaches Will Disappear by 2100 If Climate Change Persists

A new study published in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change on Monday has reported that almost half of the world’s beaches could be gone by the year 2100 if climate change continues as it is. The research predicts that coastlines could see further erosion. Fox News reported that satellite imagery was used by scientists to track how beaches have changed over the past 30 years.

“A substantial proportion of the world’s sandy coastline is already eroding, a situation that could be exacerbated by climate change,” researchers wrote in the study. “Here, we show that ambient trends in shoreline dynamics, combined with coastal recession driven by sea level rise, could result in the near extinction of almost half of the world’s sandy beaches by the end of the century.”

According to Michalis Vousdoukas, the study’s lead author, half of these beaches “will experience erosion that is more than 100 meters. It's likely that they will be lost.”

A study that was published in February suggested that “extreme weather events caused by climate change could result in an economic recession ‘the likes of which we've never seen before,’” reported Fox News. “A substantial proportion of the threatened sandy shorelines are in densely populated areas, underlining the need for the design and implementation of effective adaptive measures,” the authors wrote in the study's abstract.

A separate study that was published last month suggested that “if global temperatures were to rise 0.5 degrees Celsius over the next 50 years, approximately half of the world's species would become locally extinct,” said Fox News.