Climate change threatens European conservation areas

Abstract

Europe has the world's most extensive network of conservation areas. Conservation areas are selected without taking into account the effects of climate change. How effectively would such areas conserve biodiversity under climate change? We assess the effectiveness of protected areas and the Natura 2000 network in conserving a large proportion of European plant and terrestrial vertebrate species under climate change. We found that by 2080, 58 ± 2.6% of the species would lose suitable climate in protected areas, whereas losses affected 63 ± 2.1% of the species of European concern occurring in Natura 2000 areas. Protected areas are expected to retain climatic suitability for species better than unprotected areas (P<0.001), but Natura 2000 areas retain climate suitability for species no better and sometimes less effectively than unprotected areas. The risk is high that ongoing efforts to conserve Europe's biodiversity are jeopardized by climate change. New policies are required to avert this risk.

Observed and predicted effects of climate change on species abundance in protected areas

“…There has been global concern about how these changes might affect protected area networks, one of the main tools used by conservationists to prevent biodiversity loss. Previous assessments of climate change risk to these networks have considered either the presence or representativeness of particular habitats or biomes 5,6 or the distributions of species [7][8][9] . However, to be effective at the species level, protected areas must protect populations large enough to have low extinction risk [10][11][12] .…”

Protected areas act as establishment centres for species colonizing the UK

“…Facilitating range expansion, therefore, has the potential to become one of the most effective conservation strategies that can be deployed to minimize climatic and other risks to species [3,4]. However, such strategies still lack robust empirical underpinning: there is limited evidence of the effectiveness of static protected areas (PAs) to protect species per se ( [5][6][7] but see [8]), let alone if species distributions become more dynamic [9][10][11][12][13].…”

Paleodistribution modeling suggests glacial refugia in Scandinavia and out‐of‐Tibet range expansion of the Arctic fox

“…2010; Araújo et al. 2011). The general approach is to identify the variables that determine most of the variation in species presence.…”