NCCSP

How conservation practitioners may need to change their approach

Consensus about the nature and extent of climate change has emerged among atmospheric scientists.  There is little contention that the global climate is now undergoing a period of rapid change caused, primarily, by elevated concentrations of greenhouse gases that are traceable to human activity.  The complex feedbacks between climate, land use, land cover, and biodiversity foil attempts to make specific predictions of how wildlife may respond to changing climatic conditions, but many general projections have been made.  These include changes in breeding and migratory phenology, species range shifts of up to hundreds of kilometers, a general decline in habitat extent and quality  and subsequent decline of population size for many species, loss of genetic diversity, and an overall potential loss of 30% of the world’s species diversity.  Due to the rapid advance of climate change, few species are expected to adapt and/or evolve in response to changing conditions.  For some generalist species or species that gain suitable habitat north of their historic range, populations are expected to increase and ranges are expected to expand in response to more favorable conditions.  Many of these effects have already been documented with an average increase in global temperature of only 0.7º C.

Land and wildlife managers are faced with maintaining populations of native and endemic species within the boundaries of static conservation areas.  Predicted shifts in species’ ranges, however, and declines in habitat quality will challenge managers and threaten their ability to meet management and conservation objectives.  Further, the complexity of climate change projections, high level of uncertainty associated with future projections, and potential interaction between climate change and other stressors make identifying appropriate management strategies especially difficult.  Additionally, most natural resource managers, especially those at the state level, are operating under insufficient funding, mounting species imperilment, and habitat degradation.  As managers deal with immediate and severe threats to wildlife populations, consideration of long term yet equally severe threats such as climate change may fall by the wayside.

Many of the approaches that conservation practitioners take towards identifying land for conservation and managing land and wildlife populations are highly suitable under past, current, and future conditions.  Other approaches, however, will need to change in order to adapt to climate change.  In fact, some primary tenets of wildlife management, such as umbrella species and historical range of variation (HRV), are suddenly obsolete if we consider climate change projections.