Highgate Cemetery, located in north London, is home to more than 50,000 graves, including some of the most famous people on the planet. Douglas Adams, author of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, pop star George Michael, and Karl Marx, who is considered the father of communism, are among the few famous people who were laid to rest there.
However, the cemetery, which is visited by more than 100,000 (living) people a year, is in danger of becoming more ruined in the face of climate change.
Warming temperatures have led to the soils drying up, freak and intense storms which batter the already derelict gravestones and helping to spread rampant fungi across the grounds.
The clay soil deep beneath the surface is contracting and expanding due to the changing heat, causing graves to shift.
This also allows tree roots to spread beneath the surface, adding further instability to the graves.
Chief gardener Frank Cano told AFP: “The threat to the cemetery is from our trees, from the ivy, from the brambles.
“It’s basically nature trying to take the cemetery back.”
As a result, a group called Friends of Highgate Cemetery have launched a competition for landscape designers to come up with a strategic plan to battle the weathering of the cemetery in the ever-shifting climate.
Martin Adeney, chairman of the Friends of Highgate Cemetery, said: “The plan has got to stretch out for the next 20-plus years and during that time global warming is going to continue.”
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In other parts, the heat could dry out the soil, reducing plant productivity and decreasing vegetation rapidly.
Dr Chris Boulton, of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter, said: “The general expected trend towards warmer, wetter weather is likely to cause an overall increase in vegetation in temperate places like Great Britain.
“However, we wanted to find out whether even ‘smooth’ climate change might lead to abrupt shifts in vegetation.
“A lot of research has focused on ‘tipping points’ in large systems like rainforests and oceans.
“Our study doesn’t predict abrupt shifts across the whole of Great Britain — 0.5-1.5 percent of the land area depending on the climate scenario — but it shows numerous shifts can happen on a localised level.
“We also find early warning signals before some of the abrupt shifts.
“This is good news as it shows the potential for being able to predict them in the real world.”