Climate and Conservation

Landscape and Seascape Science, Planning, and Action

By Jodi A. Hilty, Charles C. Chester, Molly S. Cross

ISLAND PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Island Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61091-171-9

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Page,
Dedication,
FOREWORD,
PREFACE,
PART I - Setting the Context,
Chapter 1 - Climate Change Science, Impacts, and Opportunities,
Chapter 2 - Landscape and Seascape Climate Change Planning and Action,
PART 2 - Equatorial and Tropical Landscapes,
Chapter 3 - Albertine Rift, Africa,
Chapter 4 - The Brazilian Amazon,
Chapter 5 - Mesoamerican Biological Corridor,
PART 3 - Temperate and Mediterranean Landscapes,
Chapter 6 - Boreal Forest, Canada,
Chapter 7 - Cape Floristic Region, South Africa,
Chapter 8 - Eastern Mongolian Grassland Steppe,
Chapter 9 - Northern Great Plains, North America,
Chapter 10 - Washington State, USA,
PART 4 - Freshwater and Seascapes,
Chapter 11 - Alps Freshwater, Europe,
Chapter 12 - Sundarbans Mangrove Forest, Bangladesh,
Chapter 13 - Vatu-i-Ra Seascape, Fiji,
Chapter 14 - Wider Caribbean Region,
PART 5 - Montane Landscapes,
Chapter 15 - Altai-Sayan, Eurasia,
Chapter 16 - Great Eastern Ranges, Australia,
Chapter 17 - Madrean Sky Islands, North America,
Chapter 18 - The Northern Appalachiacadian Ecoregion, North America,
Chapter 19 - Yellowstone to Yukon, North America,
PART 6 - Polar Land to Seascapes,
Chapter 20 - Arctic Alaska, USA,
Chapter 21 - Antarctica,
PART 7 - Lessons Learned,
Chapter 22 - Moving Forward on Climate Change Science, Planning, and Action,
REFERENCES,
CONTRIBUTORS,
INDEX,

CHAPTER 1

Climate Change Science, Impacts, and Opportunities

CHARLES C. CHESTER, JODI A. HILTY, AND STEPHEN C. TROMBULAK

Across a vast array of human endeavors, climate change is demanding fundamental reconsideration of past approaches—be it in applied research on agricultural technologies, policy setting on water distribution, long-range planning for natural disasters, and so on. The list is long, and the arena of biodiversity conservation is no exception.

The practice of conservation has a long tradition of managing for historical reference points that range from particular dates (e.g., pre-Columbian in the Americas) or idealized conditions (e.g., "primitive wilderness") to quantitative assessments of particular species (e.g., fish stock and ungulate levels under "maximum sustained yield"). Even having long shed the naïve notion of a "balance of nature," biologists and conservationists have nonetheless incorporated cyclical and nonlinear dynamics within what are, ultimately, static models of whatever it is they are trying to protect. Yet under rapid climate change, many of these reference points may soon become unachievable, perhaps nonsensical. Climate change is forcing us to modify our approach to conservation, for climate change means that we can no longer manage for a historical reference point, but rather must manage for change. Barring all but the most unlikely of scenarios, this is not a choice: change is coming.

Conservation at the scale of landscapes and seascapes—hereafter referred to as "scapes"—is a necessary perspective and tool for achieving conservation goals in light of these inevitable changes. For this book we define a scape as a mosaic of local ecosystems interconnected by biophysical processes and allowing for populations of focal species to thrive over multiple generations (we come back to this in more detail later in this chapter). Increasingly over the past few decades, scientists, managers, and conservationists have come to acknowledge that working across scapes to conserve biodiversity is a prerequisite for effective biodiversity conservation. The threat of climate change has added further weight to the necessity of this approach. While scape-scale conservation is one of the most commonly recommended strategies for conserving biodiversity as the climate changes (Heller and Zavaleta 2009), those who have begun putting these concepts into practice have quickly realized that this is largely uncharted territory. As but one tangible example, in our experience of administering a climate change grant program under the auspices of the Wildlife Conservation Society, we found little agreement over what constitutes "applied, landscape-scale climate change adaptation." When we invited a panel of climate change professionals to help us review a number of short preproposals, there was unanimous consensus on whether or not to invite a longer second proposal only 22 percent of the time. Further, dialogue both within the grant program's advisory committee and across the science and conservation community has revealed a lack of consensus on terminology, priorities, and what constitutes an applied climate change-adaptation project.

Even as climate change can be detected and needs to be conceptualized and considered at a scape scale, on-the-ground management action generally occurs at more localized scales. Further, what is needed in one region of the scape might be very different from another. Additionally, land management agencies have their own mission and goals and lack mandate, experience, and mechanisms for effective cross-agency planning and implementation. Compound all this by working across international borders and the matter becomes even more challenging. The combination of these multijurisdictional challenges with the uncertainty inherent in projected impacts of climate change results in a variant of "analysis paralysis"—in this case, "climate paralysis."

All the same, there are emerging examples of large-scape conservation efforts incorporating climate change into their work. A number of initiatives around the world are working to implement conservation across large expanses of land and oceans, often working across multiple international boundaries. Many of these efforts have incorporated climate change adaptation—coping strategies in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected altered climate conditions—into their planning and action. In this volume, we capture nineteen examples of such efforts from around the globe. We hope that these case studies can help direct governments, nonprofits, industry, and others as they grapple with how to prioritize their planning and activities in light of climate change.

This chapter first offers a short overview of climate change's historical influence and projected effects on biodiversity. We use this section to summarize the context for this book, referring to key insights from the rapidly expanding literature on the relationship between climate change and biodiversity (and while there are now any number of books and articles providing extensive overviews of the issue, two highly recommended background publications are Hansen and Hoffman [2011] and Hannah [2011]). We then summarize why those impacts necessitate a large-scape perspective on biodiversity conservation, and outline a number of general principles for making conservation decisions in light of climate change. After highlighting several opportunities for conservation that climate change creates, we provide an overview of the remainder of the volume.

Climate Change and Biodiversity

The intertwined relationship between climate and biodiversity constitutes a fundamental tenet of biogeography (Lomolino et al. 2010). Specific concern over the effect of anthropogenic climate change on biodiversity dates to at least 1980, when Norse and McManus recognized the threat that natural or anthropogenic climatic changes may pose to biodiversity in protected reserves. Since then, a perpetual intertwining of high uncertainty and generalized concern has constituted a stable facet of the literature on climate change and biodiversity, causing Peters and Darling (1985) to recommend that conservation plans should be amended to consider the potential negative effects of climate change. Although we have learned a good deal about these effects in subsequent decades, the natural resource management and conservation community writ large has only just commenced to act on this grand recommendation.

Past and Future Changes

Researchers have examined the effects of climate change on biodiversity both through empirical and modeling studies. Regarding the former, an average global warming of roughly 0.74 degree Celsius over the last century has entailed a host of physical changes that includes decreased frequency of extreme cold events, increased frequency of extreme hot events, increased area affected by drought, decreased snow cover, melting of glaciers and ice in the arctic and Antarctica, warmer ocean temperatures, increased ocean acidity, sea-level rise, and changes to disturbance regimes such as wildfire, flooding, coastal storm surges, and pest outbreaks (IPCC-WG2 2007). In turn, these physical changes in climate are already influencing plants, animals, ecological processes, ecosystem structure and function, and ecosystem services around the globe. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has also cataloged evidence of long-term biological trends as evinced in studies lasting over twenty years and ending after 1990, concluding that out of over 28,000 data series, 90 percent indicated significant changes consistent with warming (IPCC-WG2 2007).

Speaking most broadly, biodiversity will respond to changes in climate in two ways. First, a species can adapt to the changes within its current range via the mechanisms of phenotypic plasticity and/or adaptive evolution. Phenotypic plasticity is simply the capacity of an individual to respond to changing conditions (e.g., phenological changes in the timing of activities such as mating and movement or behavioral changes such as altering food sources), whereas adaptive evolution constitutes genetic change brought about by the process of natural selection (Running and Mills 2009).

Second, a species can adapt by movement, be it shifting to a different aspect on a mountain (i.e., north, east, south, or west), or moving a hundred kilometers away. Research has shown that this latter type of movement is already happening with many species, and it is happening without the conscious help or interference of humankind (more on this later). However, the extant human footprint influencing more than 80 percent of the Earth's terrestrial surface (excluding Antarctica) will likely keep expanding and increasingly impede the ability of species to move (Sanderson et al. 2002; Hilty et al. 2006). The difference between past movements during paleocli-matic changes and those underway today is that species now need to negotiate not only the biophysical or natural components, but also an increasingly humanized scape.

The idea that conservation has to occur at a large scale did not arise recently. Well before the threat of climate change became widely recognized, the rise of landscape ecology and its associated tools (such as geographic information systems and global positioning system collars) had literally transformed our ability to understand and predict how species move across regions, thereby leading us to understand that very few protected areas will be large enough to protect all species within their boundaries (Hilty et al. 2006). The need for species to move beyond formal protected areas in order to survive constituted a central reason why natural resource managers and conservationists had begun to refocus their attention to the scape scale. Today, climate change analyses and projections have reinforced this need to look across large scapes.

Specific ecological responses to climate change have been reviewed extensively (see for example, Lovejoy and Hannah 2005; Parmesan 2006; IPCC-WG2 2007; Walther 2010; Walther et al. 2002). These included significant changes in the following:

• primary productivity and growing season length

• phenology (the timing of life-history events such as bud burst, flowering, denning, migrations, etc.)

• species assemblages and community composition

• trophic and other species interactions

• habitat availability and quality

• the distribution and abundance of terrestrial, aquatic, and marine plants, vertebrates, and invertebrates (including both native and nonnative species)

• the geographical ranges of pathogens and diseases

The complexity of these myriad potential changes lies in direct contrast to how the threat of climate change has been commonly perceived. Polar bears (Ursus maritimus) and American pikas (Ochotona princeps) are two species widely associated with the threat of climate change (Kovacs et al. 2011; Beever et al. 2011). For both species, the mechanism of the climate threat—viz., decreasing habitat due to warming conditions—seems intuitively straightforward. The reality, however, can be more complex. Pikas, for example, can be affected by cooler temperatures due to loss of snow pack. In other words, even where the overlying causal change is a warming climate, the actual mechanisms leading to a decline in the species can manifest themselves in unexpected ways. To this point, Parmesan et al. (2011) warn that it is difficult to attribute changes in any single particular species to climate change, not only because climate change operates at large spatial scales, but because a species' responses are particular to that species' unique biology. They further argue that "responses to climate are inextricably intertwined with reactions to other human modifications of the environment. Even where climate is a clear driver of change, little insight is gained by asking what proportion of the overall trend is due to greenhouse gases versus solar activity. From the perspective of a wild plant or animal, a changing climate is a changing climate, irrespective of its cause" (2). Although Parmesan and colleagues are making a relatively fine point here regarding how biologists should respond to guidance from the IPCC on distinguishing attribution, the broader cautionary point holds. Overall, as Willis and Bhagwat (2009) conclude in a review of several fine-scaled modeling studies, understanding the effects of climate change on biodiversity combined with human-induced habitat fragmentation constitutes "a serious undertaking fraught with caveats and complexities."

Despite these uncertainties, with anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions continuing to increase toward the upper end of scenarios developed by the IPCC (IPCC-SRES 2000), further warming of the Earth's climate seems inevitable and ecological consequences will undoubtedly continue to manifest across the globe. Coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation models generally concur that global average temperatures will likely increase a further 0.64–0.69 degree Celsius over the next twenty years, with the greatest temperature increases at high northern latitudes and over land, and less warming over the southern oceans and North Atlantic. Best estimates of global average temperature change by the end of the twenty-first century range from 1.8 to 4.0 degrees Celsius, depending on assumptions about future greenhouse gas emissions (IPCC-WG1 2007). Projected emission rates and the resultant warming will likely further exacerbate many of the observed ecological responses to recent climate changes, as well as result in environmental and ecological conditions that are difficult to anticipate. In addition to these changes in global averages, we can expect to see the magnitude and even direction of changes in temperature and precipitation vary across space and time (e.g., across seasons) with more extremes likely (Girvetz et al. 2009).

Consequences for Conservation

All of the changes described above dictate the need to incorporate climate change in our natural resource and conservation efforts. To be more specific: change is happening and inevitable such that it is not possible to move forward with effective conservation without explicitly considering climate change. Failure to do so in many cases may mean ultimate failure to achieve the conservation goals set forth. For example, in working to protect a species with a northward-shifting range due to climate change, designing a reserve around its current range could lead to a reserve that only hosts the target species in the short term. Instead, a reserve farther north or a network of reserves that facilitate the species' northward movement may be more appropriate. This inchoate practice of incorporating climate change considerations into natural resource planning has led to the proliferation of a number of labels ranging from "climate ready" and "climate resilient" to "climate smart" and "climate savvy." While we do not at all reject any of these, the term that we use throughout this book is climate change adaptation.

As noted earlier, climate change entails significant implications regarding the common use of historical reference points as management targets. This includes the manner in which conservation practitioners have been coming to grips with the problem of "shifting baselines." One need tread carefully with this useful concept, for there are at least two central conceptualizations of shifting baselines that differ in a nuanced but substantial way from each other (Papworth et al. 2009). First, there is the physical reality of shifting baselines—higher average temperatures, lower fish population counts, higher concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, lower precipitation levels, greater extent of urban sprawl—all of which are readily measurable according to a baseline rooted to a particular time. Whether due to natural or anthropogenic causes, these will all vary over time, thus creating thephysical reality of a shifting baseline. Then there is the human perception of shifting baselines—the common tendency of humans to perceive a baseline as inexorable, forgetting or ignoring that the baseline has shifted to something very different than what it was at an even earlier time. This social perception of the physical reality is generally referred to as "shifting baseline syndrome" (Weber and Stern 2011).

The conservation community has to grapple both with how baselines have shifted over time and with how the perceptions of those baselines have shifted. Natural resource managers ultimately must come to terms with some variant of the following question: What is it going to mean to "protect an ecosystem" in a particular area—be it Yellowstone National Park, the Alps, or the Great Barrier Reef—if climate change is inexorably shuffling and redistributing their biological communities? The answer will require empirical data, philosophical interpretation, and moral judgment, and consequently it is one of the most challenging questions facing the conservation community today. A central premise of this volume is that the difficulty of all of these questions can be ameliorated by focusing on a scape approach that allows for movement of species, be it across ranges of latitude, altitude, or microclimate.

(Continues...)Excerpted from Climate and Conservation by Jodi A. Hilty, Charles C. Chester, Molly S. Cross. Copyright © 2012 Island Press. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
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