CONSERVING CREATURES’ COMFORTS

I make no apologies for another item about climate change, the gravest problem of our times, and the perils for wildlife it entails. All species have their “comfort zones”, the habitat conditions in which they are most comfortable and can survive and thrive. The largely unrecognised, or at least generally ignored, elephant in the planetary room is that climate change is rapidly transforming the habitats where our plants, animals and other organisms that make up earth’s biota live. As their environments heat up or alter in other climate-driven ways, their biological occupants must move to habitats fit for them. But where? In so many cases, terrestrially anyway, places into which they could once have moved are too fragmented and denied by human activity, mainly agriculture and urbanisation. A few can adapt and do well, urban badgers & foxes for example, but many, especially the stenoecious which are often already rare, cannot. Worse, climate change is already destroying coral reefs and forests on which multitudes of species depend – we do not even know how many or have a full inventory of them.

In other writings I have mentioned the Anthropocene, the sixth mass extinction, the million species that are predicted to be lost for ever and, in the UK, the terrifying reports of what is happening before our eyes in our green spaces as biological diversity shrinks. The point I want to make here is that conserving endangered species has so far often failed to take climate change into account. It is no good protecting species if climate change destroys their habitats but that is exactly what is happening as the climate gets hotter, sea levels rise, ice sheets & glaciers melt and storms, fires, floods and extreme weather events become more frequent.

Scientists and conservation researchers are now beginning to recognise this problem. An example is a recent paper by Aimee Delach and colleagues in Washington DC[1]. They considered 459 animals in the USA, their sensitivity to climate change and whether any such sensitivity had been considered in the approach to their conservation. They found that “99.8% of species are sensitive to one or more of eight [climate change] sensitivity factors, but [conservation] agencies consider climate change as a threat to only 64% of species and plan management actions for only 18% of species.” Their paper reflects how conservationists are failing to take climate change into account when devising conservation strategies for threatened species and it is likely that is a worldwide strategic omission and just as prevalent in the UK. All of us must keep climate change front and centre in our daily thinking and actions, not just in our wildlife conservation work, of course, but in every aspect of our lives.

Betts Ecology strive to maintain optimum and stable habitat conditions for the diverse range of species that live in our green spaces – their “comfort zones” –  keeping climate change in the forefront of our thoughts and deeds, ensuring habitat connectivity and delivering biodiversity net gain.

 © Betts Ecology

[1] Delach, A., Caldas, A., Edson, K.M. et al. Agency plans are inadequate to conserve US endangered species under climate change. Nat. Clim. Chang. 9, 999–1004 (2019) doi:10.1038/s41558-019-0620-8