Climate Change Science, Impacts, and Opportunities

CHARLES C. CHESTER, JODI A. HILTY, AND STEPHEN C. TROMBULAK

Across a vast array of human endeavors, climate change is demanding fundamental reconsideration of past approaches—be it in applied research on agricultural technologies, policy setting on water distribution, long-range planning for natural disasters, and so on. The list is long, and the arena of biodiversity conservation is no exception.

The practice of conservation has a long tradition of managing for historical reference points that range from particular dates (e.g., pre-Columbian in the Americas) or idealized conditions (e.g., "primitive wilderness") to quantitative assessments of particular species (e.g., fish stock and ungulate levels under "maximum sustained yield"). Even having long shed the naïve notion of a "balance of nature," biologists and conservationists have nonetheless incorporated cyclical and nonlinear dynamics within what are, ultimately, static models of whatever it is they are trying to protect. Yet under rapid climate change, many of these reference points may soon become unachievable, perhaps nonsensical. Climate change is forcing us to modify our approach to conservation, for climate change means that we can no longer manage for a historical reference point, but rather must manage for change. Barring all but the most unlikely of scenarios, this is not a choice: change is coming.

Conservation at the scale of landscapes and seascapes—hereafter referred to as "scapes"—is a necessary perspective and tool for achieving conservation goals in light of these inevitable changes. For this book we define a scape as a mosaic of local ecosystems interconnected by biophysical processes and allowing for populations of focal species to thrive over multiple generations (we come back to this in more detail later in this chapter). Increasingly over the past few decades, scientists, managers, and conservationists have come to acknowledge that working across scapes to conserve biodiversity is a prerequisite for effective biodiversity conservation. The threat of climate change has added further weight to the necessity of this approach. While scape-scale conservation is one of the most commonly recommended strategies for conserving biodiversity as the climate changes (Heller and Zavaleta 2009), those who have begun putting these concepts into practice have quickly realized that this is largely uncharted territory. As but one tangible example, in our experience of administering a climate change grant program under the auspices of the Wildlife Conservation Society, we found little agreement over what constitutes "applied, landscape-scale climate change adaptation." When we invited a panel of climate change professionals to help us review a number of short preproposals, there was unanimous consensus on whether or not to invite a longer second proposal only 22 percent of the time. Further, dialogue both within the grant program's advisory committee and across the science and conservation community has revealed a lack of consensus on terminology, priorities, and what constitutes an applied climate change-adaptation project.

Even as climate change can be detected and needs to be conceptualized and considered at a scape scale, on-the-ground management action generally occurs at more localized scales. Further, what is needed in one region of the scape might be very different from another. Additionally, land management agencies have their own mission and goals and lack mandate, experience, and mechanisms for effective cross-agency planning and implementation. Compound all this by working across international borders and the matter becomes even more challenging. The combination of these multijurisdictional challenges with the uncertainty inherent in projected impacts of climate change results in a variant of "analysis paralysis"—in this case, "climate paralysis."

All the same, there are emerging examples of large-scape conservation efforts incorporating climate change into their work. A number of initiatives around the world are working to implement conservation across large expanses of land and oceans, often working across multiple international boundaries. Many of these efforts have incorporated climate change adaptation—coping strategies in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected altered climate conditions—into their planning and action. In this volume, we capture nineteen examples of such efforts from around the globe. We hope that these case studies can help direct governments, nonprofits, industry, and others as they grapple with how to prioritize their planning and activities in light of climate change.

This chapter first offers a short overview of climate change's historical influence and projected effects on biodiversity. We use this section to summarize the context for this book, referring to key insights from the rapidly expanding literature on the relationship between climate change and biodiversity (and while there are now any number of books and articles providing extensive overviews of the issue, two highly recommended background publications are Hansen and Hoffman [2011] and Hannah [2011]). We then summarize why those impacts necessitate a large-scape perspective on biodiversity conservation, and outline a number of general principles for making conservation decisions in light of climate change. After highlighting several opportunities for conservation that climate change creates, we provide an overview of the remainder of the volume.

Climate Change and Biodiversity

The intertwined relationship between climate and biodiversity constitutes a fundamental tenet of biogeography (Lomolino et al. 2010)....