VIEWPOINT

Human Responses to Climate Change will Seriously ImpactBiodiversity Conservation: It’s Time We Start Planning for ThemJames E.M. Watson1,2

1 School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Management, University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia2 Global Conservation Program, Wildlife Conservation Society, Bronx, NY 10460, USA

KeywordsClimate change; indirect effects; direct effects;

time-scale; adaptation planning; species

vulnerability; human adaptation.

CorrespondenceJames Watson, School of Geography, Planning

and Environmental Management, University of

Queensland, St Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia.

E-mail: jwatson@wcs.org

Received9 December 2013

Accepted9 December 2013

EditorAndrew Knight

doi: 10.1111/conl.12083

The consequences for biodiversity of human-driven cli-mate change cannot be ignored. The rate at which theearth is warming is accelerating, and it is likely to takecenturies for the climate system to sync back to a naturalclimate cycle, regardless of the mitigation policies imple-mented. The quantity of greenhouse gases in our atmo-sphere is such that climate change can now no longerbe considered a ‘future threat’. Across the planet weare already witnessing, among other things, change inspecies’ phenology, distributions and abundance, masscoral bleaching events, changes in fire frequency, and theloss of ecosystems due to rapid de-glaciation and sea-levelrise.

The chorus of concern on what climate change meansfor biodiversity has driven an extraordinary increase inresearch into both impacts and, sometimes, potential so-lutions. Over the past decade the number of articles pub-lished in the peer-reviewed conservation literature hasgrown on average by 20% per annum. This growth isboth staggering and laudable as it highlights how serious

the conservation science community is about tackling thethreat that human-driven climate change poses.

Nevertheless, a quick examination of the climatechange literature reveals that when assessing how, whereand why species and ecosystems are vulnerable to climatechange, and the different adaptation strategies that needto be implemented to cope with the challenges climatechange presents, most conservation scientists usually ig-nore the single most significant impact: how humans arelikely to respond and adapt. In almost all impact and plan-ning assessments published to date, the reality that manyspecies’ abilities to respond to climate change is alreadyimpaired by a myriad of interacting threatening processesdriven by human activities (e.g., habitat destruction, frag-mentation, altered fire regimes) is ignored. Furthermore,as humans continue to respond to a changing climate,these threatening processes are likely to either changeand/or intensify in both space and time.

The ways in which humans respond to climatechange is already driving many of the climate-related

Conservation Letters, January/February 2014, 7(1), 1–2 Copyright and Photocopying: C©2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1

Climate change vulnerability and adaptation J. E.M. Watson

ecological degradation we are witnessing across theglobe. For example, retreat of sea-ice has facilitated therecent opening up of the Arctic for oil and gas mining andtransport route development that is directly exacerbatingimpacts on polar biodiversity. Expansion of agriculturalactivities due to more favorable rainfall regimes acrossthe Albertine Rift and the valleys of the Congo Basinis now increasingly threatening the most biodiverseregions in Africa. These are human responses to theongoing effects of climate change that are to some degreepredictable.

There are also extreme (and abrupt) climate changeimpacts that promote unanticipated responses from hu-mans that can lead to sometimes rapid and severe lossesof highly vulnerable species’ populations. On all inhab-ited continents in the past year, we have witnessed theeconomic and physical displacement of human popula-tions due to flooding and drought, which in turn, hasoverwhelmed natural systems, converting them to otheruses, or degrading their productivity. These events oftenleave human populations highly vulnerable and can leadto new types of behavior that can seriously ramificationsfor biodiversity. For example, there is often a substan-tial increase in poaching of tiger and deer species dur-ing floods in southern and southeastern Asia. Floods arelikely to be more frequent in the regions these speciesreside under even the most moderate of future climatechange scenarios.

Beyond poaching, there are also increasing numbers ofunanticipated adaptations by humans to climate changeimpacts that are not well planned but are necessary forour short-term survival, and which may have dire con-sequences for biodiversity. For example, the constructionof (often ineffective) seawalls aiming to slow the impactof sea-level rise in Papua New Guinea has led to thewholesale destruction of some of the most biodiverse andprotein-productive coral reefs in the world. Understand-ing human behavior and both the immediate reactive andplanned responses to climate change effects will be essen-tial for mitigating the impacts on biodiversity of human’sresponses to climate change.

We need to recognize that this will require a funda-mental shift when it comes to understanding the impactsof climate change and the planning strategies we need topursue. This means a change of mindset for the vast ma-jority of conservation scientists who have focused theirentire efforts on understanding the ecology of species and

their likely responses to climate change. By doing so theyhave overlooked a basic tenet of our field: conservation isfundamentally about people.

We need to change the way we frame our science onclimate change vulnerability. When we think about theimpact of climate change on biodiversity, future researchneeds to be focused not only on modeling the proba-ble impacts of climate change on particular species, butalso on how direct human-driven causes of extinctionwill change as a consequence of climate change and whatthe anticipated new drivers of extinction are likely to be.This focus on drivers will lead us away from a speciesand ecosystem centric view on climate change vulnera-bility to one that focuses primarily on how biodiversity’smajor threat – humans – are likely to respond. Realign-ing our focus in this way will allow us to identify strate-gies that consider how humans are going to respond toa changing climate. The most effective responses will bethose that allow both vulnerable species and ecosystemsand human communities to most rapidly and continu-ously adapt to the challenge. Scenario planning is clearlyan important tool in this process; however, it will be in-effective unless there is a formal integration of ecologyand climatology with the social, economic and politicalsciences, which will better facilitate understanding of thetheory and practical methodologies suited to the study ofhuman responses to climate change.

It is time to reflect on what has been achieved overthe past decade in the conservation literature when itcomes to climate change and reframe our collective viewon what needs to be done in the future. Failure to pre-dict likely human adaptations to climate change commitsus to identifying a series of adaptation responses that willbe wholly inadequate to the demands of the coming cen-tury. It will result in flawed conservation planning, in-effective strategies and potentially avoidable dire conse-quences for biodiversity.

Acknowledgements

I thank Dan Segan, Molly Cross, Erika Rowland, DavidWilkie, Liana Joseph, Jane Carter Ingram, Eric Sander-son, Joe Walston, Karen Mustin, David Hole, StuartButchart, Bruce Young and Richard Pearson for discus-sions around the major themes in this manuscript. Ithank Andrew Knight for constructive edits on an earlierversion of this manuscript.

2 Conservation Letters, January/February 2014, 7(1), 1–2 Copyright and Photocopying: C©2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.