Coral reefs are under threat due to bleaching, glaciers are melting and species and communities are being forced to migrate, resulting in the loss of rare animals, a WWF study released at the World Parks Congress (WPC) showed.

"It has become abundantly clear that climate change is a new and major threat to protected areas," WWF International Director General Claude Martin said at the fifth WPC under way in the eastern port city of Durban.

"World leaders must take steps immediately to reduce carbon dioxide emissions if the world's protected areas are to avoid irreversible damage," he told reporters on the second day of the event attended by some 2,500 environmentalists from more than 170 countries.

The once-a-decade conference staged by the World Conservation Union is taking stock of the world's protected areas and setting priorities to safeguard them.

Many environmental experts blame climate change on the burning of fossil fuels for energy, which accounts for more than 80 percent of global warming pollution. The atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are currently at their highest point for 420,000 years, according to scientific tests.

The WWF study gave a series of examples of how climate change was affecting the environment, including the disappearance of two amphibian species, the Golden Toad and Harlequin Frog, in a protected area, the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve in Costa Rica, due to an El Nino-related drought in the late 1980s.

El Nino is marked by periodic shifts in sea temperatures in the main Pacific currents, and can have an impact on climate patterns around the world.

Meanwhile, Scientists measuring ice changes in Mount Kilimanjaro National Park, home to Africa's highest mountain, predict the area's glaciers will be gone by 2020.

And global warming has been blamed for the record-high tropical sea surface temperatures in 1998, which caused coral reefs to lose symbiotic algae due to severe bleaching.

A trend in Europe towards higher temperatures has stimulated an increasing number of frogs and toads to spawn before Christmas -- an advantage in mild winters in that the tadpoles have longer to mature, but a disadvantage because a cold snap could kill the eggs.

Shorter winters and variations in season lengths in Europe also affect bird breeding and migration.

South Africa's Karoo scrubland, which contains 50 percent of the world's succulent plants, has been identified as being at high risk of damage from increased aridity.

And in one Swiss national park, plants have been moving up the slopes of a mountain at a rate of between one and four metres (three to 12 feet) per decade in attempts to escape heat.

"For a plant, that's quite a lot," WWF scientist Laura Hansen said. "And sometimes they don't know where to go, which results in species disappearing."

Martin said the migration of species could cause the relocation of protected areas.

"Protected areas' authorities could be faced with the difficult task of having to shift protected areas to keep up with moving habits and ecosystems if the full range of biodiversity is to be preserved," he said.

"This parks congress must recognise that climate change is going to have a severe impact on the implication of parks management and future of protected areas," Martin added.

"It will be very shortsighted if we do not consider what we have to do."

SPACE.WIRE