Americans love national parks — climate change is threatening their futures

National Park Week is an opportunity to commemorate the landscapes and historical sites that form the crown jewels of the nation’s public lands system. For more than a century, these treasured places, from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to Gates of the Arctic National Park in Alaska, have offered millions of people the chance to find the healing and respite only nature can provide. But right now, climate change is threatening these iconic lands and waters. There is something we can do, though, to save these places and even our communities for future generations: Protect more nature.

National parks are the locations of countless treasured memories and they’re instrumental in forming life-long connections with nature. I remember my mom taking my brother and I on a road trip to the Grand Canyon when I was a little girl. It was the first time I had experienced such vast amounts of nature. But climate change is threatening the long-term survival of our national parks as we know them. 

Rising seas, higher temperatures and more extreme weather are threatening the very existence of these lands and waters and the histories and traditions found on them. Iconic ice sheets are receding at a frightening pace in Glacier National Park. In Yosemite, warming winters are causing mass die-offs in conifer forests, forever altering the landscape and driving wildlife out of their natural habitats. And in Virgin Islands National Park, warmer ocean waters are wiping out the park’s iconic coral reefs. If we do nothing, these threats will only increase.

Scientists are clear that protecting 30 percent of all lands and waters in the United States by 2030 is one of the best ways to stave off the worst effects of climate change. Increasing protections for these lands would protect them from destructive extraction by oil and gas developers while helping curtail climate change by having forests act as carbon sinks for atmospheric carbon.

There are a variety of steps that federal, state and local decision-makers can take to achieve this 30×30 goal. President Biden should make full use of the 1906 Antiquities Act. In addition to providing additional protections to vital landscapes, new national monuments would allow us to tell new cultural stories on public lands, incorporating the perspectives, histories and traditions of the communities that have called these landscapes home but have so often been left out of the conversation.

We must acknowledge the harms done in the process of making these national treasures and the histories that these parks hold, from stolen lands to access and enjoyment discrimination. Many parks now include programming on the histories of Black and Indigenous peoples in the parks, and four national parks operate under co-management systems with Tribal Nations. The Biden administration and the National Park Service must continue to right the wrongs and harms done in the past to ensure all of our national park systems are as equitable and accessible as possible for all people. 

We must also protect existing public lands from oil and gas extraction. If we’re going to take on climate change, we have to dramatically reduce carbon pollution, and that means stopping pollution at the source so these lands can be used to store carbon rather than unleashing it. We can also pass bold conservation legislation, like the Civilian Climate Corps (CCC). An ambitious CCC program would do the work to protect our public lands and ensure our communities can benefit from them. That includes everything from climate resilience projects like coastal restorations to building and maintaining the infrastructure that support national parks. And we must support the locally led conservation efforts that are essential to protecting the landscapes in and around our communities.

Protecting more landscapes would create more opportunities for people across the country to connect with nature. Preserving more nature would allow more people to get outdoors and help close the nature equity gap. And exposure to nature at a young age makes a person more likely to maintain those connections as an adult, creating the next generation of environmental advocates. The vistas of the Grand Canyon began my own journey to environmental advocacy — we must ensure young people have that opportunity as well.

Right now, about 12 percent of lands and waters in the U.S. are protected. To achieve 30×30, we need to protect more landscapes in the next decade than we did in the last century. National parks and public lands play a key role in achieving that goal.

Christine “Chris” Hill is the senior director of Sierra Club’s Our Wild America campaign. She is the first Black woman to lead Sierra Club’s legacy campaign on the outdoors and lands, water as well as wildlife in its history. She has a background in law, community organizing and partnerships and more than a decade of experience advocating to protect communities and the natural world.