What are the major environmental threats to national parks?
Drilling, mining and logging near park borders, air and water pollution that drifts or flows into our parks, and even the waste that some visitors leave behind are all threats our national parks face.
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Climate change is the greatest threat the national parks have ever faced.
Drilling, mining and logging near park borders, air and water pollution that drifts or flows into our parks, and even the waste that some visitors leave behind are all threats our national parks face.
Disasters like floods and wildfires affect the national parks and the communities whose economies depend on them. In the visualization below, see the trends for every National Park Service unit in all 50 states.
The consequences of the climate crisis – more wildfires, devastating drought, sea level rise, flooding, ecological disease – are plaguing the country's national parks. Most recently, unprecedented flash flooding overwhelmed Yellowstone National Park and some of its surrounding areas.
National parks benefit the environment by supporting a wide assortment of critical needs such as biodiversity, healthy ecosystems and key habitats, preserving endangered species, acting as a source of clean water (and as a producer of clean energy), and helping to reduce the impacts of natural disasters due to an ...
Air pollution can create a haze that affects visibility, dulling national park views by softening the textures, fading colors, and obscuring distant features.
The National Park Service presently has a cumulative monetary shortfall of approximately $11.1 billion. [6] This shortfall, which has accumulated over the years, has arisen from a backlog of unfunded operations, construction projects, land acquisitions, and resource protection projects.