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Topic Name: Researchers say Climate change will affect national parks, forest reserves and other protected areas around the world
Category: Environmental engineering
Research persons: Sandy Andelman
Location: Conservation International, United States
Details
Climate
change will affect national parks, forest reserves and other protected areas
around the world, in some cases altering conditions so severely that the
resulting environments will be virtually new to the planet, according to a study
presented at the U.N. climate change talks in Bali, Indonesia.
Scientists from Conservation
International (CI), the University of
Wisconsin and the University of Maryland
analyzed the World Protected Areas Database with ten Global Climate Models and
three different scenarios examined by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change.
They found that under the most likely scenario, more than half the world’s
protected territory is vulnerable to impacts of climate change, with some
regions facing the disappearance of current climatic conditions by 2100 or a
transition to conditions not found on Earth in the previous century.
“We previously assumed that if the land is protected, then the plants and
animals living there will persist,” said Sandy
Andelman, lead author of the study and CI’s vice president who heads the Tropical
Ecology Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) network. “That may be wishful
thinking.”
Countries where 90 percent or more of the total protected territory has
climate conditions that will disappear globally or be transformed to novel
climates are Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Colombia, Cuba,
Ecuador, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guyana, Ivory Coast, Mexico, Niger, Rwanda, Sri Lanka,
Sudan, Swaziland, Togo, Uganda and Venezuela.
With millions of people living in the most seriously affected countries,
maintaining the health of protected areas and the biological diversity they
contain is crucial to the availability of fresh water, food, medicines and other
life-sustaining benefits of nature.
However, the study indicates that climate change will cause increased
extinctions of species unable to adapt to altered climatic conditions, and
substantial changes to the natural ecosystems.
“We urgently need to better understand how climate change will affect life
on Earth so we can develop solutions, and to do that we need consistent data
about long-term trends at a very large scale,” Andelman said.
Her TEAM network, established through CI funding, monitors such long-term
trends in the biological diversity of tropical forests. A network of tropical
field stations using standardized methods of data collection allows scientists
anywhere on Earth to quantify how tropical nature is responding to climate
change and human impacts. The first five TEAM sites operate in tropical forests
across Latin America, with the program expanding to Africa and Asia by the end
of 2008 and plans for 20 sites on three continents by the end of 2009.
The study also identified “refuge” countries where protected areas face
minimal risk from climate change, including Botswana, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon,
Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique,
Myanmar, Namibia, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone and Somalia. Ensuring the adequate
protection of nature reserves in these countries will provide baseline
information to help understand the dynamics of biological diversity relatively
unaffected by climate change.
Along with Andelman, the paper’s authors are Jan Dempewolf of the
University of Maryland, Jack Williams of the University of Wisconsin, and two
members of CI’s Center for Applied Biodiversity Science – Jenny Hewson, a
remote sensing specialist, and Erica Ashkenazi, a GIS specialist.
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