Identifying the world's most climate change vulnerable species: a systematic trait-based assessment of all birds, amphibians and corals.

Wendy B Foden,Emre Turak,Robert A Holland,Rodolphe Bernard,Jean-Christophe Vié,Alexander Gutsche,Long Cao,Lyndon M Devantier,Simon N Stuart,Ariadne Angulo,Stuart H M Butchart,Georgina M Mace,Adrian F Hughes,Susannah E O’Hanlon,Simon D Donner,H Resit Akçakaya,Stephen T Garnett,Vineet Katariya,Çagan H Şekercioğlu

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0065427

Abstract

Climate change will have far-reaching impacts on biodiversity, including increasing extinction rates. Current approaches to quantifying such impacts focus on measuring exposure to climatic change and largely ignore the biological differences between species that may significantly increase or reduce their vulnerability. To address this, we present a framework for assessing three dimensions of climate change vulnerability, namely sensitivity, exposure and adaptive capacity; this draws on species’ biological traits and their modeled exposure to projected climatic changes. In the largest such assessment to date, we applied this approach to each of the world’s birds, amphibians and corals (16,857 species). The resulting assessments identify the species with greatest relative vulnerability to climate change and the geographic areas in which they are concentrated, including the Amazon basin for amphibians and birds, and the central Indo-west Pacific (Coral Triangle) for corals. We found that high concentration areas for species with traits conferring highest sensitivity and lowest adaptive capacity differ from those of highly exposed species, and we identify areas where exposure-based assessments alone may over or under-estimate climate change impacts. We found that 608–851 bird (6–9%), 670–933 amphibian (11–15%), and 47–73 coral species (6–9%) are both highly climate change vulnerable and already threatened with extinction on the IUCN Red List. The remaining highly climate change vulnerable species represent new priorities for conservation. Fewer species are highly climate change vulnerable under lower IPCC SRES emissions scenarios, indicating that reducing greenhouse emissions will reduce climate change driven extinctions. Our study answers the growing call for a more biologically and ecologically inclusive approach to assessing climate change vulnerability. By facilitating independent assessment of the three dimensions of climate change vulnerability, our approach can be used to devise species and area-specific conservation interventions and indices. The priorities we identify will strengthen global strategies to mitigate climate change impacts.

Highlights

Vertebrate extinction rates are currently estimated to be 10–100 times greater than background [1], largely due to the effects of habitat loss, over-exploitation and invasive species [2,3]
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated that 20–30% of the world’s species are likely to be at increasingly high risk of extinction from climate change impacts within this century if global mean temperatures exceed 2–3uC above pre-industrial levels [6], while Thomas et al [5] predicted that 15–37% of species could be ‘committed to extinction’ due to climate change by 2050
To explore the relationship between climate change vulnerability conferred by biological traits vs. exposure, we present bivariate plots (Figure 2) which highlight areas with greatest concentrations of (i) species that have traits conferring high sensitivity and low adaptive capacity but that are not highly exposed, (ii) highly exposed species that lack high sensitivity and low adaptability traits, and (iii) species that are highly exposed, highly sensitive and have low adaptive capacity

Summary

Introduction

Vertebrate extinction rates are currently estimated to be 10–100 times greater than background [1], largely due to the effects of habitat loss, over-exploitation and invasive species [2,3]. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated that 20–30% of the world’s species are likely to be at increasingly high risk of extinction from climate change impacts within this century if global mean temperatures exceed 2–3uC above pre-industrial levels [6], while Thomas et al [5] predicted that 15–37% of species could be ‘committed to extinction’ due to climate change by 2050. The IPCC and Thomas et al studies have been the only global-scale assessments of potential climate change impacts on species that cover multiple taxonomic groups These and most other similar large-scale assessments are based primarily on species distribution (bioclimatic envelope) models, which use correlations between species’ observed distributions and climate variables to predict their distributions and their extinction risk under future climate scenarios [9,10,11]. Incorporating species’ physiological, ecological and evolutionary characteristics, in conjunction with their predicted climate change exposure, will facilitate more accurate identification of the species most at risk from climate change [15,16,17]

Methods

Results

Conclusion