Biodiversity Faces Severe Solution Challenges in Climate Change

In his book, "Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming" (Island Press, 2009), University of California, Berkeley, biologist Anthony Barnosky. says that because of climate change, wilderness left to its own will no longer look like the natural areas we see today.

Our conservation strategies must be rethought, he adds, because business-as-usual will not preserve all the aspects of nature we have come to know, love and respect.

Setting aside preserves, for example, puts animals and plants in a bind: As global warming makes their current habitats unsuitable, surrounding human development prevents them from moving to more hospitable places. The alternative, assisted migration, smacks of creating wild zoos - quasi-natural areas like the dinosaur wonderland portrayed in the book and movie "Jurassic Park."

"The new twist in preserving nature is that we might have to come up with a separate but equal system, where we actively set aside some tracts of land as wildlands where people can experience this feeling of 'wilderness,' but recognize that the species that live in those places and the landscape are not going to be the species and landscape we are used to," he says. "Our kids are going to see very different things in those kinds of places than we do."

Warming already altering patterns of migration

Barnosky describes in his book how global warming is already causing shifts in the ranges of animals and plants, disrupting migrations and spawning, and stressing animals confined to parks and reserves.

While ecosystem change and extinction are normal, Barnosky reminds us that past climate change, such as cooling at the beginning of glacial periods and warming with the onset of interglacial periods, took place over thousands of years.

The current warming is happening faster, by a factor of about 10.

Global warming multiplies impacts of human activities

Global warming comes on top of many other environmental impacts that have been stressing the environment, Barnosky notes in his book. He wrote "Heatstroke," in part, because he "wanted to raise awareness that global warming is not just an add-on consequence as far as impacts on ecosystems and nature are concerned.

We are all aware of habitat fragmentation, invasive species, growing human populations, and the tradeoff between resources needed to sustain us versus resources to sustain other species.

People tend to think those are the big problems, and that global warming is going to heat things up a bit.

"In reality, global warming, as far as how it is going to change nature, is as big or bigger a problem than all of those other four, and especially when you put it together with all of the other four.

There are feedbacks that make everything much more severe. It is like multiplying rather than adding everything up."

Solutions to protect both species and wilderness

Wilderness must be protected, he says, if for no other reason than that it acts as a canary in a coal mine, "a barometer of how healthy the Earth actually is."

But imperiled species must also be protected as biodiversity resources, he adds, even if this requires assisted migration of not only the endangered species, but also the plants and animals these species interact with in their ecosystem.

One alternative that some scientists have put forward is Pleistocene rewilding, a wild idea to re-establish the large "megafauna" that dominated Earth during the planet's last major bout with global climate change, the period of on-and-off glaciation that took place between 2 million and 10,000 years ago.

Read more details about Barnosky and Heatstroke