Climate Change and Biodiversity
Climate Change and Biodiversity – Review
For many years habitat destruction due to population pressure, and the overuse or exploitation of resources, and the spread of invasive species, have been the principal human-related threats to international biodiversity. Now conservation managers are faced with an even bigger menace to that biodiversity; that of human-induced climate change, a further effect of overuse or exploitation of the planet’s resources, and one that is likely to interact unfavourably, and exacerbate the effects of, the other threats. However, this is more than just a problem for conservationists; it is a significant challenge to individual ingenuity. To the laymen climate change is synonymous with global warming and understandably most people are concerned principally with how a change in regional weather is originally going to impact on their value of life. Although a broad increase in temperature is perhaps the most clear sign of climate change a universal change of the world’s weather patterns is a prediction few scientists would deny. Some places will be drier, others wetter, the majority hotter, a few maybe cooler. The changes will be unpredictable, and naturally occurring climatic phenomena like El Ni?o and La Ni?a, which have international ramifications as far afield as the north Atlantic eventually causing droughts and storms in various places, could change in their frequency and intensity resulting in dire regional consequences in some areas. This volume considers international climate change in durations of the effects on the world’s biodiversity. The special response of biota to these changes is unknown because we do not have specific data on the direction, magnitude or permanence of climate changes and because we cannot make accurate predictions about the future time of anthropogenic greenhouse gases emissions or the resultant ecosystem changes resulting from carbon cycle feedback. Regional ecosystem changes are especially difficult to forecast because they are dependent on changes elsewhere and the world’s climate is extremely complex and difficult to model with any actual level of certitude. What we do know, though, is that prior periods of global warming closely associated with natural climatic oscillations occurred in the existence of an intact ecosystem and intact habitat and that this is no longer the case. Basically, there are three responses available for a species, though method of response depends not only on the ecology and life history features of the species included, but on responses by other species in the same ecosystem, especially recent invasive species: 1) Adaptation in situ to constantly changing conditions, dependent on physical and behavioural plasticity and/or pre-existent adaptive hereditary material. 2) Range migration, dependent upon species mobility and geographic limitation; 3) Extinction. The volume is usually divided into six section, each typically containing self-contained accessible (at student and quickly learned municipal level) literary texts. A amount of practical case studies designed to represent special events are intercalated between the chapters. Part 1 provides definitions and puts biodiversity and climate change into context. Part 2 looks at present climate changes and current biotic responses. Part 3 uses information from past natural climatic oscillations and makes general comparisons to see what, if anything, can be quickly learned from them. Part 4 attempts to understand the future and looks at what computer modelling is available to try and predict trends. Part 5 addresses the issues that need effectively tackling immediately and considers the options open to conservation managers. Part 5 looks at policy responses and urges all stakeholders, whether corporate or government, to act now in the greatest concentrations of the planet. In 1992 one of the editors of this volume, Thomas Lovejoy, together with R L Peters, produced one of the influential works on the subject: Global warming and Biological Biodiversity. Climate Change and Biodiversity is really an update in the light of much more – and much more alarming – additional information. But at least there is more information, and there are options that can be taken if we don’t want to see the planet and all of its inhabitants wasted. This could turn out to be a landmark volume and should be widely read by a wider audience than to whom it is possibly addressed. There is vast scope for an even more accessible r?sum?.