Climate Change Adaptation Planning for Biodiversity Conservation: A Review

Climate change has been linked to well-documented changes in physiology, phenology, species distributions, and in some cases, extinction. Projections of future change point to dramatic shifts in the states of many ecosystems. Accommodating these shifts to effectively conserve biodiversity in the context of uncertain climate regimes represents one of the most difficult challenges faced by conservation planners. A number of adaptation strategies have been proposed for managing species and ecosystems in a changing climate. However, there has been little guidance available on integrating climate change adaptation strategies into contemporary conservation planning frameworks. The paper reviews the different approaches being used to integrate climate change adaptation into conservation planning, broadly categorizing strategies as continuing and extending on “best practice” principles and those that integrate species vulnerability assessments into conservation planning. We describe the characteristics of a good adaptation strategy emphasizing the importance of incorporating clear principles of flexibility and efficiency, accounting for uncertainty, integrating human response to climate change and understanding trade-offs.CitationWatson, J. E. M., M. Rao, A.-L. Kang, et al., 2012: Climate change adaptation planning for biodiversity conservation: A review. Adv. Clim. Change Res., 3(1), doi: 10.3724/SP.J.1248.2012.00001.Editor’s notesBiodiversity provides basic needs for livelihoods and development of human beings. China, as one of countries with richest biodiversity in the world, contains 17 globally significant biodiversity hotspots. It was observed that climate change has impacted the biodiversity more or less from physiological, phonological and species level, to ecosystem level, and in some cases extinction of species. With the increasing climate change, the biodiversity subject to be more significantly impacted and human intervention is expected to amplify the impacts. Climate change is believed to be one of key threats of the biodiversity conservation. What kinds of cost-effective strategies and measures may be taken to allow biodiversity to adapt climate change impacts is a great challenge in China. This special issue invited three authors to share actions and experiences on the adaptation of biodiversity to climate change, including a case study, a review of adaptation planning and an introduction of national strategy and research developments. The editors hope these articles can provide useful information for the biodiversity conservation under climate change in China.