- A nationwide analysis found that most US national parks are highly vulnerable to climate change, with many facing the risk of irreversible environmental change rather than gradual decline. Wildfires, drought, pests, and sea level rise are converging to reshape the landscapes parks were created to preserve.
- Vulnerability is uneven: Parks in the Midwest and eastern United States face the greatest cumulative risks due to fragmented habitat, pollution, invasive species, and limited adaptive capacity of ecosystems. Many western parks appear to be more resilient but experience multiple serious disturbances at once.
- Coastal parks are threatened by rising seas and storm surge, while inland forests face compounding stresses that can lead to long-term shifts from forest to shrubland or grassland. Once such changes occur, it may be impossible to return to previous environmental conditions.
- As climate stressors intensify and policy responses weaken, park managers are shifting from preserving historic conditions to managing ongoing transitions. America’s parks can increasingly serve less as static sanctuaries and more as living records of how nature reorganizes itself under accelerating change.
America’s national parks were envisioned as sanctuaries for forces rebuilding the rest of the continent. Climate change is now breaching that limit. A recent assessment of park vulnerability suggests that many of these landscapes are simply not warming or drying out in known ways. They are being pushed into environmental conditions that may be fundamentally different from those they were created to conserve.
Research, published letter of reservationevaluated 259 park units across the contiguous United States using a framework common in climate science: exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. Exposure measures the degree of climate change; Sensitivity captures how strongly the ecosystem responds; Adaptive capacity reflects the ability of the species to adjust to the landscape. Taken together, these dimensions describe not only how much parks will change, but how likely they are to experience transformation.
By that measure, the vulnerability is massive. Two-thirds of the park has been identified as being highly exposed to at least one potentially transformative threat, including wildfire, drought, forest pests, or sea level rise. In total, 77% were ranked as extremely vulnerable overall or to a specific high-impact hazard. This does not mean that all gardens face disaster, but some can expect stability.
Geography subject. Parks in the Midwest and eastern United States have the greatest growing vulnerability. These landscapes are often embedded in heavily modified environments with fragmented habitats, high air pollution, invasive species pressure, and limited topographic variation. Such situations reduce adaptive capacity. Species trying to track the shifting climate must cross farmland, suburbs or highways, barriers that did not exist when the parks were established.
In contrast, Western parks often seem less vulnerable in the overall analysis. Their rugged terrain creates microclimates that can act as refuges. Elevation gradients allow species to move upslope rather than across upland. Low neighborhood population density also helps. Yet this apparent resilience is misleading. Many western parks face multiple “transformational” disturbances simultaneously, particularly fires, prolonged droughts, and insect outbreaks.
The interaction between these disturbances is crucial. Severe drought weakens forests, making them more susceptible to bark beetles; Insecticide increases fuel load; The fire burns hotter and more widely; Post-fire recovery may fail completely. In some places, forests are already being converted to scrub or grassland. Such changes are not temporary losses but environmental restructuring.
Coastal parks face a different trajectory. Rising seas and storm surges threaten salt marshes, mangroves and coastal forests, while inland development impedes their migration. The study puts dozens of parks along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts at risk of significant flooding. Once submerged, these ecosystems cannot simply be restored to their previous state.
What emerges is a pattern of uneven vulnerability. Some parks face gradual degradation; Others are sudden changes. The greatest risk is not necessarily where warming is fastest, but where the ability to adapt to exposure is low. Flat terrain, intense surrounding land use, and existing environmental pressures can make even moderate climate change consequential.
Management philosophy is beginning to reflect this reality. The National Park Service has adopted a framework known as “Prevent, Adopt, Direct.” In some cases managers try to maintain historical conditions; In others they allow change to proceed; In others they lead ecosystems to new states that may preserve key functions or species. The approach clearly recognizes that it is no longer possible to preserve the parks as static “vignettes” of the American past.
Recent policy developments have compounded this challenge. Federal actions that undermine climate mitigation — such as rescinding the Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding — reduce the likelihood that the underlying drivers of change will be addressed at the national level. At the same time, expansion of resource extraction on nearby public lands and proposals to reopen protected marine areas to commercial fishing increase external pressures on park ecosystems. Reported staffing reductions and funding constraints across the park system further limit the ability to monitor and respond to emerging threats.
The result is a widening gap between the scale of environmental change and the institutional capacity to manage it. Climatic effects accumulate gradually until they do. A drought year becomes a drought; A large fire season is a rule; Coastal erosion leads to permanent flooding. Because parks are embedded in expansive landscapes, many drivers originate outside their boundaries, beyond the authority of park managers.
None of this means national parks will become important. On the contrary, they may become more valuable as habitats for biodiversity and benchmarks of environmental change. But their roles will change. Rather than preserving static snapshots of nature, they can serve as laboratories of growing adaptation, documenting how ecosystems reorganize under stress.
The study’s most profound insight is that vulnerability is not evenly distributed. One of the most iconic parks of the American West has enough ecological diversity to change the buffer, at least for now. There aren’t many lesser-known parks in the East and Midwest. Their landscapes are flatter, more fragmented and more exposed to pollution and invasive species. In these places, climate change interacts with chronic human pressures to create externalities.
The park system was designed around permanence: fixed boundaries, permanent landscapes, and the assumption that nature within would remain widely recognized. Climate change is destroying that context. Whether parks can retain their ecological identity will depend less on geography, surrounding land use and legal protection than on the pace of global warming.
In the coming decades, visitors may still encounter familiar scenes: forests, swamps, deserts, mountains. Realizing how quickly these environments are migrating below the surface can be more difficult. National parks were once imagined as places outside of time. Increasingly, they are becoming places where time is accelerating.
quote:
- Michalak, JL, CE Littlefield, JE Gross, TG Mozelewski, and JJ Lawler. 2026. “Relative Vulnerability of US National Parks to Aggregate and Transformative Climate Impacts.” Conservation Paper 19, no. 1: e70020. https://doi.org/10.1111/con4.70020
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Previously published with news.mongabay Creative Commons Attribution
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