Half the world will not stay the same. Planet Earth Needs New Map

New research on how global temperatures and rainfall evolve over the next 77 years has concluded that up to half of the world will change by the end of the century.

The research predicted that the climate shift would be so important that we would likely have to remap our planet's climate entirely.

The classification of the climate of Köppen Geiger as the most widely used mapping system categorizes the world into five regions based on temperature, rainfall and seasons: tropical, dry, temperate, continental and polar.

The system was first created by German-Russian climatologist Vladimir Köppin in 1884 and has since been updated many times.

However, the Earth has not undergone such drastic changes as the ones we can expect to see by 2100.

The research says the most worrying thing is that Europe will be more likely to see the "most obvious" changes in the climate zone, according to the study's authors.

In a summary of their findings published by Indi, the Ankara-based team of academics wrote: "Up to half of Earth's land area is in danger of becoming a different climate zone by the end of the century, with the largest changes expected in Europe and North America."

The statistics do not look good, with significant climate change expected in between 65 and 91 percent of Europe's land area.

This compares with 51 to 66 percent in North America, and 38 to 48 percent worldwide as a whole.

Rising rates of global warming are behind climate change, of course, which are set to accelerate in the coming years and could have a devastating impact on plants and animals.
"The rate of change is expected to accelerate over the twenty-first century, suggesting that endangered species and agricultural practices (also classified in this context) may have less time to adapt to changes in climate zones than previously anticipated," the researchers noted.

Europe is probably expected to get colder, with "the temperate climate zone expanding [on the continent] to the current cold climate zones" by 2100.