Climate Change and Biodiversity

Climate Change & Biodiversity

• Anthropogenic climate change significantly impacts biodiversity, necessitating revised conservation goals.
• The focus is shifting towards integrating people into multifunctional land, freshwater, and seascapes to facilitate adaptation.
• Climate and biodiversity actions are being integrated into global policy processes for biodiversity, climate, and sustainable development.

Evidentiary Impacts of Climate Change

• Climate change impacts plants and animals across marine, terrestrial, and freshwater biomes.
• These effects occur at genetic, individual, population, habitat, and ecosystem scales.
• Changes include interspecies interactions, community composition, and ecosystem structure.
• Historically, biodiversity loss was due to land/sea use changes (34%), direct exploitation (23%), climate change, and pollution (14% each).
• Climate change is expected to surpass other threats in the 21st century through direct effects and interactions.

Observed Impacts & Interactions

• Observed impacts encompass altered abiotic conditions such as temperature shifts, extreme weather, sea level changes, and greenhouse gas concentrations.
• Climate threats interact, leading to accumulated impacts, such as complex biotic responses from ocean temperature, acidification, and hypoxia.
• Climate change exacerbates non-climate threats like habitat degradation and increased disease susceptibility.
• Human responses toward mitigation and adaptation can affect biodiversity negatively or positively.

Systemic & Organism-Level Responses

• Terrestrial, freshwater, and marine systems exhibit different biodiversity responses due to varying biophysical properties and spatial structures.
• At the individual level, climate change impacts manifest as changes in growth rate, reproductive success, behavior timing, disease susceptibility, and body size.
• Population-level changes include shifts in size, age structure, sex ratio, and gene flow.
• Species-level changes include abundance, range size, location, range fragmentation, and genetic diversity.
• These changes can increase or decrease extinction risk, varying across different parts of species' ranges.

Ecosystem-Level Effects & Challenges

• Interspecies interactions shift, impacting competitors, predators, prey, pollination, parasitism, and symbioses.
• Cascading effects alter community composition, function, interactions, and disturbance effects like fire.
• Ecosystem shifts such as savanna to woodland transitions, and novel recombinations can occur.
• Impacts on ecosystem functioning hinder their capacity to deliver Net Primary Productivity (NPP).
• Difficulty in attributing impacts to specific causes impedes effective action.
• Attribution strength decreases from alterations in species abundances/ranges to NPP changes.

Spatial Variation & Velocity

• Climate impacts vary across subregions of large areas and are affected by natural corridors.
• Biodiversity hotspots and isolated ecosystems face challenges due to limited migration corridors.
• Climate velocity trajectories (CVT) indicate the speed and direction species must move to maintain their climate envelope.
• Climate refugia, where climate parameter velocity is slow, are associated with larger protected areas and complex terrain.
• Globally, temperature trajectories are poleward, and towards complex topography.

Temperature Analysis & Biodiversity Intactness

• CVT distance increases from 1 to 2 degrees to 6 degrees of warming.
• Maps illustrate CVT at 6 degrees of warming above the baseline decade (2000s).
• Color coding shows global intactness for terrestrial and ocean surfaces based on indices.
• Arrows indicate predicted CVT for each Key Biodiversity Area (KBA); absence indicates climatic stability.
• Black arrows mark shifted KBAs; red arrows signify 'lost' climatic envelopes.
• CVT shift varies spatially, with warming resulting in a lesser increase from 2 to 6 degrees.

Continental vs. Island KBAs

• At 1 degree of warming, 8.7%, 4.8%, and 3.0% of KBAs on continents, islands, and oceans have stable climates, respectively.
• These percentages decrease to 1-3% across all three groups at 6 degrees of warming.
• Island KBAs face higher climate loss (34-38%) compared to continental landmasses (6-7%).
• Such high losses from insular and coastal biodiversity hotspots could imply disproportionate losses to global biodiversity.

Species Adaption & Loss

• Species and assemblages can become separated from their climate envelopes, decreasing population viability and potentially resulting in local extinction.
• Marine species show faster poleward range shifts (5.92 km yr-1) compared to terrestrial species.
• The faster shifting in Marine species is due to greater temperature sensitivity and lower dispersal constraints.
• Terrestrial species exhibit slower range shifts (1.11 km yr-1) due to wider thermal safety margins.
• Habitat fragmentation turns hotspots into islands, accelerating climate-related biodiversity loss.

Isolated Ecosystems & Insular Endemics

• Isolated ecosystems like mountains and islands can become ‘evolutionary traps’.
• Native species, especially endemics, have higher vulnerability to climate change.
• Impacts may be neutral to positive for invasive species.
• Insular biodiversity hotspots are key to global biodiversity, hosting one-fifth of terrestrial species.
• Insular species are vulnerable with limited resources and poor adaptation, increasing extinction risk.
• Insular extinctions are likely to disproportionately contribute to the global loss of biodiversity.

Insular Challenges & Marine Vulnerability

• Planning in insular hotspots is impeded by limited RCM data and downscaling challenges.
• Climate vulnerable species are concentrated in tropical marine regions.
• Specific taxonomic groups, like marine mammals, differ in vulnerability patterns.
• Changing climate can alter ecosystem functions and integrity, exacerbating species loss.
• Loss of ecosystem integrity impacts carbon storage capacity for mitigating climate change.

Additional Biodiversity Pressures

• Direct drivers (land/sea-use change, direct exploitation, pollution, and invasive species) interact with climate change, which results in complex and nonlinear biodiversity responses.
• Habitat fragmentation due to infrastructure development poses a significant risk.
• Increasing nutrient inputs to coastal waters combine with climate drivers, resulting in coastal dead zones.
• Climate change and invasive/disease species interactions present concern, exacerbated by global trade.
• Invasive species benefit from climate change, weakening biotic assemblages.

The Importance of NCP

• Declines in biodiversity affect Material, non-material and regulating contributions from nature to sustain billions of people worldwide.
• Co-production of NCP depends on the perceived values of NCP and governance systems.
• NCP has both ecological and social determinants, with distribution being crucial.
• In the context of SDGs, benefits aim to meet everyone's needs, embodying 'leave no one behind'.
• Equity is key aspect of both The Convention on Biological Diversity and UNFCCC responsibilities.

Changing Conservation Objectives

• Nature conservation was focused on preserving historic state of nature, prior to human presence.
• Efforts now integrate concerns for equity, social justice and Indigenous peoples impacted by conservation.
• Previous conservation actions were too limited relative to escalating threats of biodiversity.
• There is an increased ambition to address failures through the Marine Protection Atlas .
• In multifunctional spaces emphasis is placed on People using and benefiting from nature, across all states.

Land Sparing & Sharing

• The historical dichotomy between 'human' and 'natural' spaces breaks down across this gradient.
• Multifunctional 'scapes optimize the integrity of nature and people across all states of nature.
• The multifunctional 'scape approach incorporates land 'sparing' and 'sharing' to reduce footprint of food production.
• Land and seascape-based approaches incorporating sustainable use are used in ‘shared' spaces.

Conservation Benefits & Objectives

• Multifunctional 'scapes are embedded in ecosystem and regional scale processes.
• Corridors of natural habitat link across multiple scales to allow for climate migration.
• Cultural landscapes can have higher biodiversity than natural ones, due to long term stewardship.
• Research investment seeks to understand how intensities and types of land use affect biodiversity, a habitable climate and good quality of life for all.

Restoring Nature

• Heavily modified anthromes (cities, intensive farmland, etc) Minimize damage, assure local NCPs
• Focus on mosaics of nature and people predominantly natural to managed ecosystems
• Natural habitats in supporting biodiversity in remote areas
• Mix protection and other efforts (governed by communities & gov)
• Enable climate migration with: Forest ecosystems Savanna ecosystems Mountain slopes Ocean ecosystems
• Corridors help shared species connect with reservoirs of nature

Climate Migration

• Multifunctional 'scapes across land, freshwater and marine biomes.
• Focus on :
  • Intact wilderness spaces
  • Shared spaces (mosaic of habitat) that provides contributions from nature to people

Solutions for Climate Change

• Promoting atmospherically sound transformations of mixed savannas and grasslands to woodland.
• The transitions are moderated by grazing balance (intact herbivore populations, appropriate livestock grazing)
• Utilize controlled wood harvesting for native biodiversity.
• Manage Wetlands to retreat inland naturally
• Protect carbon sequestration, shoreline protection, and wildlife that enhances fisheries.

Nature Based Solutions

• Nature-based solutions are active strategies to rebuild or increase measures of intact nature through:
  • Provide benefits to people
  • Carbon sequestration
  • Green city benefits
• Negatives of NbS:
  • Plantation forests (bad biodviersity)
  • Afforestation of savannas and peatlands (bad forests + ecosystem) NbS for climate has to at least be a positive (or nuetral) term for biodiversity Fractal nature is important for NbS in land/sea that is at least able to conserve areas.

Restoration Needs

• Critically needed :

  • Natural systems where recovery is unlikely
  • Systems damaged to the point of slow progress

• Need re-establishing in the context of change for shifting climate conditions that may affect mangroves & coral.

• NbS & Restore to achieve multiple objectives relating to :

  • People
  • Biodiversity
  • Climate
  • Food
  • Economics
  • Reduced exposeure

Biodiversity Policy

• The Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 & the Aichi Biodiversity Targets set targets
  • 17% was the target amount for land protection.
  • 10% was the target amoung for ocean protection.
• Both fell sort with 42% of those land goals being effective and 46% marine life.