Well, enjoy it while you still can, because 80 years down the road, your favourite beaches will most likely disappear from the face of the earth.
Beaches will disappear
News agency AFP reported that climate change, coupled with rising sea levels, will wipe out half the world’s sandy beaches by the year 2100.And here's the scary part: even if we sharply reduce fossil fuel pollution that drives global warming, more than a third of the sandy shorelines on earth could still disappear by then.
The relevation was made after a group of researchers led by Michalis Vousdoukas, a researcher at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, plotted trend lines across three decades of satellite imagery dating back to 1984 to learn the pace of beach disappearance.
During the research, Vousdoukas and team found two scenarios.
The worst case would be the RCP8.5 pathway, which assumes that carbon emissions will continue unabated, or that Earth itself will begin to boost atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations from things like permafrost.
In this case, the world is set to lose 49.5 per cent of its sandy beaches by 2100.
Another scenario, codenamed RCP4.5, would see humanity capping global warming at about three degrees Celsius, but that would also see 95,000 kilometres of coastline disappear.
In other words, no matter what we do, beaches would disappear.
“Apart from tourism, sandy beaches often act as the first line of defence from coastal storms and flooding, and without them impacts of extreme weather events will probably be higher," Vousdoukas was quoted as saying.
The report said some of the countries that will be hit the hardest by this side effect of climate change is Australia, Canada, Chile, United States, Mexico, China, Russia, Argentina, India and Brazil.
Please don't take away our beautiful beaches.