Targeting current species ranges and carbon stocks fails to conserve biodiversity in a changing climate: opportunities to support climate adaptation under 30 × 30

Abstract

Protecting areas for climate adaptation will be essential to ensuring greater opportunity for species conservation well into the future. However, many proposals for protected areas expansion focus on our understanding of current spatial patterns, which may be ineffective surrogates for future needs. A science-driven call to address the biodiversity and climate crises by conserving at least 30% of lands and waters by 2030, 30x30, presents new opportunities to inform the siting of new protections globally and in the U.S. Here we identify climate refugia and corridors based on a weighted combination of currently available models; compare them to current biodiversity hotspots and carbon-rich areas to understand how 30x30 protections siting may be biased by data omission; and compare identified refugia and corridors to the Protected Areas Database to assess current levels of protection. Available data indicate that 20.5% and 27.5% of identified climate adaptation areas (refugia and/or corridor) coincides with current imperiled species hotspots and carbon-rich areas, respectively. With only 12.5% of climate refugia and corridors protected, a continued focus on current spatial patterns in species and carbon richness will not inherently conserve places critical for climate adaptation. However, there is ample opportunity for establishing future-minded protections: 52% of the contiguous U.S. falls into the top quartile of values for at least one class of climate refugia. Nearly 27% is already part of the protected areas network but managed for multiple uses that may limit their ability to contribute to the goals of 30x30. Additionally, nearly two-thirds of nationally identified refugia coincide with ecoregion-specific refugia suggesting representation of nearly all ecoregions in national efforts focused on conserving climate refugia. Based on these results, we recommend that land planners and managers make more explicit policy priorities and strategic decisions for future-minded protections and climate adaptation.

Restoring Asia’s roar: Opportunities for tiger recovery across the historic range

“…Securing and increasing the protection of such areas is required to sustain tiger recovery in the long-term. Such an approach clearly fits the philosophy of the United Nations Decade for Ecosystem Restoration and may be aligned with the global vision of 30x30: a global commitment to protect 30% of the world's terrestrial and marine ecosystems as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (Dreiss et al, 2022). A wide range of policies, laws and regulations related to land use, forestry and natural resource management, including land tenure regulations, agricultural, forestry, environmental, rural development and climate change policies, would be needed to for integration of range expansion areas with protected area systems (DeFries et al, 2010).…”

Mapping Canada’s Green Economic Pathways for Battery Minerals: Balancing Prospectivity Modelling With Conservation and Biodiversity Values

“…Rapid expansion of the current protected area network is thus required to meet terrestrial conservation targets (Coristine and Jacob 2018). Several recent studies have discussed some of the different objectives, or principles, that need to be considered for prioritizing future conservation areas (e.g., representative ecosystems, intact wilderness, connectivity, SAR, and climate-change refugia) (Coristine and Jacob 2018;Kraus and Hebb 2020;Stralberg and Arseneault, 2020a, b;Carroll and Ray 2021;Mitchell and Schuster, 2021;Dreiss et al, 2022;Hamilton and Smyth 2022). These and other studies further highlight the essential role of consultation, engagement, and partnerships with Indigenous peoples in the development and application of all land-use planning (Artelle et al, 2019;Schuster et al, 2019;Zurba et al, 2019).…”

Leveraging private lands to meet 2030 biodiversity targets in the United States

“…However, fee‐owned protected areas can be legally cumbersome to implement (aside from National Monuments established under the Antiquities Act), costly, and have displaced communities and negatively impacted livelihoods (West et al, 2006), in some cases counter to equity goals integral to 30×30 objectives. Moreover, despite the increasing prevalence of tools to support spatial conservation planning and conservation prioritization (Dreiss & Malcom, 2022; McIntosh et al, 2017; Sinclair et al, 2018), several studies suggest protected areas established to date overlap poorly with priority areas for biodiversity conservation (Jenkins et al, 2015; Maxwell et al, 2020) and species climate refugia (Dreiss et al, 2022).…”

“…Private land protection measures, including private reserves, land trusts, and conservation easements, have long contributed to land conservation in the United States despite representing only a small fraction of the total land under protection (Ernst & Wallace, 2008). However, private lands are increasingly considered critical for creating functional, connected, and climate‐resilient protected area networks (Bargelt et al, 2020; Dreiss et al, 2022; Gigliotti et al, 2022; Morgan et al, 2019). While private land conservation takes many forms, conservation easements—voluntary legal agreements that permanently limit the uses of private land to protect conservation values—have garnered particular interest from conservation initiatives in the United States and elsewhere due to their cost‐efficacy and legal flexibility (Capano et al, 2019).…”