If you’re someone who gleefully, and often unprompted, announces that you’re a beach person and unironically captions your beach vacation pictures on Instagram with variations of ‘water baby’ or ‘take me back to paradise’, then we’ve got some grave news for you. And for the rest of the world too, but more specifically you.
Some of the most popular beaches around the world are facing the threat of extinction because of climate change and increased human activities on beach backlines.
According to a recent study published in Natural Climate Change, nearly half of Earth’s sandy beaches could be extinct by 2100. While shorelines retreating is a natural process, the beach would usually shift and the sandy area’s size wouldn’t change much. In most cases now, humans have built structures on those backlines of the beaches, which means that the natural process is hindered and that beaches would start disappearing soon.
HawaiianIslands.com merged this data with the list of most reviewed and popular beaches from different countries online to compile a list of the beaches that could be lost before the end of the century. This list includes beaches from Nigeria, Cyprus, Italy, Cancun, Mozambique, Qatar, Bangladesh and Myanmar.
As per the study, sandy beaches make up more than one-third of the shorelines around the world. The best way to manage this impending loss is to reduce the production of greenhouse gases and to keep coastlines as natural as possible.
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