Human Responses to Climate Change will Seriously Impact Biodiversity Conservation: It's Time We Start Planning for Them

Abstract

The consequences for biodiversity of human-driven climate change cannot be ignored. The rate at which the earth is warming is accelerating, and it is likely to take centuries for the climate system to sync back to a natural climate cycle, regardless of the mitigation policies implemented. The quantity of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere is such that climate change can now no longer be considered a ‘future threat’. Across the planet we are already witnessing, among other things, change in species’ phenology, distributions and abundance, mass coral bleaching events, changes in fire frequency, and the loss of ecosystems due to rapid de-glaciation and sea-level rise. The chorus of concern on what climate change means for biodiversity has driven an extraordinary increase in research into both impacts and, sometimes, potential solutions. Over the past decade the number of articles published in the peer-reviewed conservation literature has grown on average by 20% per annum. This growth is both staggering and laudable as it highlights how serious the conservation science community is about tackling the threat that human-driven climate change poses. Nevertheless, a quick examination of the climate change literature reveals that when assessing how, where and why species and ecosystems are vulnerable to climate change, and the different adaptation strategies that need to be implemented to cope with the challenges climate change presents, most conservation scientists usually ignore the single most significant impact: how humans are likely to respond and adapt. In almost all impact and planning assessments published to date, the reality that many species’ abilities to respond to climate change is already impaired by a myriad of interacting threatening processes driven by human activities (e.g., habitat destruction, fragmentation, altered fire regimes) is ignored. Furthermore, as humans continue to respond to a changing climate, these threatening processes are likely to either change and/or intensify in both space and time. The ways in which humans respond to climate change is already driving many of the climate-related