The climate change scapegoat…getting lost in the big picture?

I started off this blog with the (I guess mostly internal) assumption of climate change being the biggest risk to biodiversity loss in the long term - the thing that would tip us over the edge into the 6th mass extinction. And I think this is something that instinctively a lot of people would agree with. It's easier to pin the great losses predicted on some large, intangible process rather than face up to the smaller more actionable causes, and climate change has been frequently stated as the biggest threat to the planet (see countless articles along the lines of “22 times the Obama administration declared climate change a bigger threat than terrorism”).

Perhaps this is why I started off thinking I would be investigating whether climate change was costing us our biodiversity, but found myself from week to week looking at individual species or ecosystems a lot of the time. Maybe it's because in one of my other modules I've been looking at large-scale remote sensing monitoring techniques as a conservation method, and I'm getting too caught up in the bigger picture. 

In a recent study by Moran and Kanemoto, researchers identified ‘hotspots’ of threat to biodiversity, stemming from consumption in the United States. The resulting images created show a great impact on species in North America and Eurasia, caused by the production of goods for exportation.  And this is only one of the major developed economies.

Moran and Kanemoto (2017) - Darker areas show higher threat from US consumption

A recent analysis of IUCN Red List data (which for many conservationists sets out the state of threat to different species) carried out by Maxwell et al reveals that in the present day, climate change is not yet the major threat to biodiversity that it is made out to be. In fact, their analysis showed that climate change only directly threatens 1,688  out of over 82,000 species studied, falling behind system modification, pollution, invasion and disease, urban development and lastly, agricultural activity (with livestock farming as the second most threatening individual activity, as per last week’s post). At this rate, it doesn’t look like many species will survive long enough to see the effects of climate change.

However, it is important to consider that this is based on a causation logic of 4 factors (storms and flooding, habitat modification, extreme temperatures and drought) and does not take into account the many potential indirect effects that climate change could have. There are other obvious limitations to looking at what ‘threatens’ a species – such things rarely operate in isolation and as I’ve realised in many of my blog posts biodiversity data is very complex and difficult to determine accurately.

So it’s not fair to say that climate change is not a big risk to biodiversity, but as Maxwell et al warn in their paper, it is crucial that action on climate change doesn’t overshadow action to reduce current threats to biodiversity. And it’s been further stated that whilst protecting biodiversity and work to diminish climate change are issues that affect each other, they are ultimately separate.

A comment by Caro and Mulder that I found interesting is “effective efforts to protect trees and reduce climate change may result in conserving only an empty forest”.  I was told in my A-level geography class that the word ‘holistic’ was key in all areas of geography, and indeed I think I put it in every essay I wrote. But I’m reminded again of the importance of a holistic strategy here. For effective management of biodiversity loss, climate action needs to be an involved part of conservation and conservation needs to include a consideration of climate change phenomena. If we’re tackling the big picture, we can’t forget about the individual components that need action.