Incorporating Climate Change Into Conservation Strategies

Thanks Jennifer,

This new study shows for the first time that protected areas can really help us cope with climate change. Our work showed that new parks and reserves can help conserve species as they move in response to climate change. That’s also good for people – who benefit from clean water, pollination and other services from healthy ecosystems.

Hi Suzanne, -- Science can help identify areas that are most biologically important, it can also document rates of change and use. Conservation International does that through our Biodiversity Hotspot priorities – areas that have high numbers of unique species and are heavily threatened.

Science can also define where new protected areas are needed. For instance, thanks to recent research, we now know that over 1,000 species are not protected at all. Getting conservation in place for all species is a high priority.

Our challenge now is to do both these tasks – setting priorities and choosing new protected areas – with climate change in mind.

Stuart – great to hear from you! (Stuart is one of the leading authorities in the world on hunting, local communities and wildlife in Africa) Once we know that protected areas can help prevent extinctions due to climate change, we have to ask how protected areas and people fit together all over again. Many communities in the tropics use forests or wildlife as supplemental or emergency income – for instance when crops fail. Climate change will impact poor farmers and pastoralists the hardest, so understanding human-wildlife relationships is key to building systems that are robust for both nature and humans that live closely with nature.

Good question, Darren. Climate change is largely caused by developed countries, but much of the most severe impact will be in tropical and developing countries where there are fewer resources and less margin for error in coping with change. So logic would suggest the ‘polluter pays’ principle, and in fact international discussions are underway to establish funds for helping poor countries cope with the effects of climate change. For example, if new protected areas are needed for nature conservation because of climate change, tropical countries will need funding to establish those areas and to help create sound management structures that work well with local people and traditions that may also be impacted by climate change.

As we were discussing with Stuart, finding protected areas or conservation solutions that work well with local communities is becoming important all over the world. As you suggest, one of the answers that is important in many regions is using private protected areas. This doesn’t always mean protected areas owned by large landholders; it can also mean protected areas held by communities.

For instance some communities that have gotten tenure to their land around Kruger National Park in South Africa have chosen to manage their land for tourism rather than using it for agriculture or other purposes.

This is very relevant to what we’ve been talking about with respect to communities and private reserves. There is a great example in Costa Rica, where they actually instituted a national system of payments for ecosystem services. And this gave private landholders of all types access to funding from the government if they saved and restored forests. So forests of all sizes – from large landholders to small community plots – picked up payments for ecosystem services. Now we can actually see the results of this in satellite images. Costa Rica’s forest cover is coming back. It’s gone from about a third of the country being forested to over half of the country being forested in just 10 years.

Tropical deforestation releases CO2 into the atmosphere and it also removes trees that would otherwise take up CO2 from the atmosphere. This means when we conserve tropical forests it has a double benefit for reducing climate change. Recent research suggests that there may even be a third benefit because the forests hold tropical soils, which contain a lot of carbon that is released as CO2 if the forests are destroyed.

So, if you’re trying to reduce your carbon footprint, one way to handle essential CO2 emissions that you can’t reduce by efficiency or by changing lifestyle – an example would be a flight to a conference or a vacation that you just don’t want to skip – you can pay for the conservation of a tropical forest that will offset that CO2 production (from the airplane in our example). Conservation International’s website has a carbon calculator where you can figure how much CO2 different activities produce and how much forest is required to offset those activities.

Now we’re getting into how we reduce climate change, and that’s an essential complement to adding protected areas because no amount of conservation effort can conserve species if climate continues to change as it is now. And as you suggest, José, there is no one solution to this problem.

The solution has to come in many small steps taken by millions of people around the world. Practicing energy efficiency and being aware of the CO2 impacts of our everyday actions, like driving cars and using hot water, is very important. A next step we can take right away is switching to renewable technologies like solar water heaters. The nice thing is that implementing efficiency and switches to local renewables, for instance home water heaters, can happen right away. We have bigger issues, like our reliance of oil for transportation, that will take longer to solve.

You’re exactly right, David. The U.S. is one of the biggest problem countries with respect to climate change, both in generating a large amount of the pollution that causes climate change and in being politically reluctant to do anything about the problem.

We need political leadership in the United States to address the problem, and that’s beginning to happen through the new Congress. But ultimately, it’s a grassroots question. We have very high consumption levels and until we’re willing to do with less and to use energy differently, much of the rest of the world, species and ecosystems will pay a price for our inaction.

Global climate has been very stable for the last ten thousand years, since we came out of the last ice age. It’s not accident that human civilization has developed in this time when climate is stable and predictable enough to reliably support crops. We’re now adding CO2 to the atmosphere that is capturing heat from the sun and warming the planet, pushing us even further away from another ice age. One of the big concerns with climate changeis that we’re putting warming onto an already warm climate and pushing the planet toward tempartures it hasn’t seen for hundreds of thousands or millions of years.

At the same time, there is an ocean circulation system called the thermal haline circulation – the Gulf Stream is part of this circulation – that brings heat from tropical oceans up to northern Europe. One thing that may happen if the Earth gets warm enough is that so much ice will melt in the artic that it will shut down this circulation system. This would make Europe get colder while the rest of the planet continues to heat up. So some very unusual and scary things can happen in addition to straight warming. And that’s one of the reasons that Europe has been much more concerned about climate change than the United States has.

Scientists are measuring the levels of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere at Mauna Loa in Hawaii and CO2 levels have risen from 280 parts per million when the measurement started, to 360 parts per million now. CO2 traps heat from sunlight, much like a greenhouse – hence the name “greenhouse effect” – and effect that can be demonstrated in a simple chamber with a light bulb.

So from physics we expect ht planet to be warming and in fact temperature measurements from around the world show that it is. Over 10 of the warmest years on record have been in the last 15 years. Ice is melting at a rapid rate at glaciers on tropical mountains and at the poles. So it’s clear this is happening; anyone who says otherwise isn’t following the science.

One of the most dramatic effects that’s already been observed due to climate change is on coral reefs. When corals get too hot they “bleach,” which means they actually expel algae that normally live within their skeletons. This makes the normally colorful corals turn white, and very often kills the coral.

Bleaching has now happened in all of the world’s coral reefs, and it happens especially during El Nino events where there are exceptionally warm waters. The loss of reefs is impacting tourism and affects local livelihoods, such as fishing. We believe we’ve only seen the beginning of the bleaching damage because El Nino events and warmer water temperatures are projected to continue to rise as the planet warms. This has a huge impact on oceans systems, but it’s not the only one.

Yes, Ruth. That’s what I was referring to earlier. The scenario in the film was based on the shutdown of the haline ocean circulation, but the film greatly exaggerated the speed at which those changes would happen. So while we don’t want to look to “Day After Tomorrow” as an accurate depiction of climate change, we do need to be concerned that the climate system can start doing funny things, especially when we melt large amounts of ice. The ocean salinity is very important, but we also have to be worried about its acidity.

CO2 dissolves directly in seawater to form acid, just as the CO2 bubbles makes it acid enough to etch a penny. We know that some species that secret calcium shells – such as clams, mussels, and corals – can be very sensitive to ocean acidity. Scientists are only beginning to understand all of the impacts that this direct change in ocean acidity may have on the oceans, but it’s another major reason to be concerned about the marine effects of climate change.

Sea level rise results both from expansion as the oceans get warmer and from the addition of melt water from melting ice into the oceans. We’ve only seen small sea level changes so far, and the largest sea level changes will take place over many centuries.

However, once these changes are set in motion, it’s likely to be impossible to stop them. So while you don’t have to move from Hawaii right now, if you want to be comfortable there in the decades to come, you should encourage your friends to do something about climate change.

Sapta, in areas such as Indonesia, where there is very high population density, we may simply have no more scope for protected areas on land. This is one of the concerns with climate change – that the space need for humans to live and thrive may make it difficult for species to find the room they need as their ranges shift in response to climate change.

However, in the marine realm, protected areas can help conserve fish stocks and reduce some of the ecological damage from climate change at the same time they conserve fish and create a better fisheries resource for people. So even in very densely populated areas, marine protected areas can be an excellent way to protect human livelihoods and protect species as climate changes.

Agribusinesses in the United States and Europe are certainly looking very seriously at climate change and figuring out crop packages that will be robust in the face of climate change. Conservation International and many of our partners are more concerned about farmers in tropical countries who may not have the resources to adapt their land management or agricultural practices to climate change.

This may have undesirable effects on species and ecosystems as farmers try to supplement their incomes from forests or wildlife. This can lead to a vicious downward circle in which ecosystems degraded by climate change yield fewer services for people, and people affected by climate change put more and more pressure on these weakened ecosystems. We’re working on strategies that make both ecosystems and human systems more robust to climate change.

Protected areas are important for conserving species and providing some ecosystem services, but as we’ve been discussing, a very important complement to protected areas is land use management systems that are robust to climate change.

So as climate changes, and we want people and nature to be living together harmoniously, the answers really have to come across entire landscapes. Protected areas are one part of that puzzle. It’s the larger landscape context that will ultimately decide whether protected areas succeed.

Mountain systems are especially vulnerable to climate change, as are high latitudes. We’re seeing loss of ice in mountain glaciers all around the world. The Himalayas are no exception. This may mean initially more water flow, but as the glaciers disappear in places like the Andes, there will be water shortages. There will also be shifts in mountain vegetation zones that will impact grazing, and have many other effects on mountain people.

So again, stepped up conservation measures and climate-friendly land-use management are going to be key as many of these changes will continue for some time even as we work hard to stop climate change as soon as possible.

Climate models are getting better all the time. Ones from northern hemisphere modeling centers do this hemisphere better, and the Australian model may be better for the southern hemisphere. I can recommend a website for you, and I'll ask my team to post a link to it on this transcript later today. So check back!

Thanks Jen. We all need to be working together to stop climate change, support land use management that will help people and nature adjust together to changes that will come, and support protected areas to ensure that all of the world's species survive this period of intense change.