The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) published a new database of protected areas at the opening of a 10-day congress on world parks, that kicked off in South Africa's eastern port city of Durban Monday.

"It lists World Heritage Sites, biosphere reserves and other protected areas... (and) for the first time, thousands of sites smaller than 10 square kilometres (four square miles), many of which are in private hands," the UN body said in a statement.

The once-a-decade World Parks Congress, hosted by the World Conservation Union and attended by 2,500 delegates from 170 countries, aims to take stock of the world's protected areas and set priorities to safeguard them.

"The area of the world's protected areas is now " the report stated.

Across the developed and developing world, the UN recorded more than 100,000 protected areas, covering a total area larger than the combined land surface of India and China, making up 11.5 percent of the earth's land surface.

But the world's oceans were lagging behind, with protected sites making up less than 0.5 percent of the seas and oceans -- representing 70 percent of the globe, the report said.

Most protected marine sites are in Europe, New Zealand and Australia -- known for its Great Barrier Reef -- while the east and southern African and south Asian coasts remain badly in need of protection, the report said.

"It makes the Indian Ocean, with its wealth of coral reefs, seagrass, and mangrove forests, perhaps the most poorly protected ocean," the report said.

The head of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) conservation group warned conference delegates that global warming was already causing irreversible damage to protected natural areas.

"It has become abundantly clear that climate change is a new and major threat to protected areas," WWF director General Claude Martin told reporters.

"World leaders must take steps immediately to reduce carbon dioxide emissions if the world's protected areas are to avoid irreversible damage."

Coral reefs are threatened by the phenomemon of bleaching -- caused by warming water temperatures -- glaciers are melting and entire species and communities are being forced to migrate due to climate variations, resulting in a loss of biodiversity, the WWF warned in a report published Tuesday.

Many environmental experts argue that global warming is predominantly caused by burning fossil fuels for energy, releasing carbon dioxide, which they hold 80-percent responsible for the phenomenon of climate change.

Tests have shown that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are currently at their highest point in the past 420,000 years.

The WWF report included several case studies to illustrate the problem.

In Coast Rica's Monteverde Cloud Forest -- listed as a protected site -- two amphibian species have disappeared due to a drought caused by the El Nino weather pattern in the 1980s.

El Nino, which occurs every few years, is characterised by the appearance of unusually warm, nutrient-poor water off Latin America's Pacific coast, and can have an impact on climate patterns around the world.

In the Mount Kilimanjaro National Park in Tanzania, home to Africa's highest mountain, scientists predict that the area's glaciers will have disappeared by the year 2020 due to climate change.

In South Africa itself, where the congress is taking place, the Karoo scrubland, which contains 50 percent of the world's succulent plants, faces a high risk of damage from increasingly arid conditions.

"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," the WWF's director said.

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

SPACE.WIRE