Nature Climate Change

Bernstein, Jennifer

doi: 10.1038/s41558-019-0532-7pmid: N/A

Lubell, Mark; Niles, Meredith

doi: 10.1038/s41558-019-0541-6pmid: N/A

Randomized control trials are a potentially useful research design for identifying the causal effects of capacity-building interventions in the context of environmental development. But new research suggests that short-term capacity-building projects do not increase the rate at which local water districts in Costa Rica adopt climate adaptation strategies.

doi: 10.1038/s41558-019-0556-zpmid: N/A

Forests play an important role in carbon storage and climate regulation, as well as supporting biodiversity. Restoration of lost and degraded areas is firmly back on the agenda with a recent UN announcement.

Walsworth, Timothy; Schindler, Daniel; Colton, Madhavi; Webster, Michael; Palumbi, Stephen; Mumby, Peter; Essington, Timothy; Pinsky, Malin

doi: 10.1038/s41558-019-0518-5pmid: N/A

Ecosystems around the world are reorganizing due to climate change 1 , motivating management responses to facilitate species persistence and maintain ecological functions. Spatial management actions are generally undertaken to relieve local stressors on populations and have recently been suggested as an approach to facilitate species range shifts, provide refugia and enhance resilience to climate change 2,3 . Efforts to identify which habitats to protect, however, typically assume that organisms do not evolve in response to shifting environmental conditions 4,5 despite growing evidence that rapid evolutionary responses occur under new selective regimes in the wild 6,7 . It is not clear whether conservation strategies would be different if evolutionary dynamics were considered during conservation planning. Here, we show that evolutionary responses fundamentally change recommendations for conservation actions. With spatially explicit simulations of a simple three-species coral reef ecosystem, we show that the preferred management strategies changed from those focusing on thermal refugia when evolutionary capacity was absent to those prioritizing trait and habitat diversity or high cover when adaptive evolution was possible. Prioritizing habitat diversity protects heat resistant populations and protects cooler refuges and the stepping stones between them. The protection of habitat heterogeneity and connectivity also produced substantially larger benefits outside reserves than refugia-based strategies, providing conservation planners an opportunity to facilitate adaptation to ongoing and unpredictable change.

Till, Aaron; Rypel, Andrew; Bray, Andrew; Fey, Samuel

doi: 10.1038/s41558-019-0520-ypmid: N/A

As environmental temperatures continue to rise and organisms experience novel and potentially lethal conditions 1–5 , the possibility of increased mass mortality events for animal populations appears likely 1,6 . Yet, due to die-off rarity and unpredictability, there have been few large-scale attempts to quantify the relationship between mass die-offs and local environmental temperatures. Here, we address this issue by analysing a database of 502 freshwater fish die-offs combined with lake-specific temperature profiles simulated for north temperate lake ecosystems. Die-offs driven by extreme summer conditions occurred disproportionately in lakes with warmer average surface temperatures and during periods of extreme heat. In contrast, we observed no relationships between current thermal extremes and die-offs attributed to infectious disease or winter environmental conditions. We forecast fish die-offs driven by summer environmental conditions to double by mid-century for north temperate lakes (2041–2059) and to increase more than fourfold by late century (2081–2099), particularly at southern latitudes. These results expose a direct link between novel temperature regimes and the increased probability of catastrophic ecological events in freshwater ecosystems.

Jiang, Yan; Zhou, Liming; Tucker, Compton; Raghavendra, Ajay; Hua, Wenjian; Liu, Yi; Joiner, Joanna

doi: 10.1038/s41558-019-0512-ypmid: N/A

Dry season length strongly influences tropical rainforest vegetation and is largely determined by precipitation patterns 1,2 . Over the Amazon, the dry season length has increased since 1979 and severe short-term droughts have occurred 3,4 . However, similar changes have not been investigated for the world’s second largest rainforest, the Congo Basin, where long-term drying and large-scale declines in forest greenness and canopy water content were reported 5 . Here we present observational evidence for widespread increases in the boreal summer (June–August) dry season length over the Congo Basin since the 1980s, from both hydrological and ecological perspectives. We analysed both dry season onset and dry season end via multiple independent precipitation and satellite-derived vegetation datasets for the period 1979–2015. The dry season length increased by 6.4–10.4 days per decade in the period 1988–2013, primarily attributed to an earlier dry season onset and a delayed dry season end. The earlier dry season onset was caused by long-term droughts due to decreased rainfall in the pre-dry season (April–June). The delayed dry season end resulted from insufficiently replenished soil moisture, which postpones the start of the next wet season and hinders vegetation regrowth. If such changes continue, the enhanced water stress in a warming climate may affect the carbon cycle and alter the composition and structure of evergreen rainforest 1,6 .

Scheffers, Brett; Pecl, Gretta

doi: 10.1038/s41558-019-0526-5pmid: N/A

A climate-driven global redistribution of species is currently underway. As species alter their geographical distributions under climate change, many will not only cross into new habitats but also new geopolitical areas. In this Perspective, we discuss the historical archetypes of managing species redistribution—persecution, protection or ignorance—which points to diverse decisions and outcomes based on a balance of societal and ecological valuation. We build the case for increasing transboundary monitoring and management of species, and for shared governance agreements that are global in scope, consisting of legally binding and biologically defensible contracts among partner countries, in what would be a critical step for the future conservation of all species.

Alpízar, Francisco; Bernedo Del Carpio, María; Ferraro, Paul; Meiselman, Ben

doi: 10.1038/s41558-019-0536-3pmid: N/A

Encouraging adaptation to climate change is fundamentally about encouraging changes in human behaviour. To promote these changes, governments, non-profits and multilateral institutions have invested in a range of adaptation projects. Yet there is little empirical evidence about which project components are effective in changing human behaviour 1,2 . This lack of evidence is concerning, given that the failure of adaptation initiatives has been described as the global risk with the highest likelihood of occurring and with the largest negative impacts 3 . Here we report on a scholar–practitioner collaboration in which a simple one-day workshop delivering two ubiquitous components of adaptation projects 4 —capacity building and the dissemination of climate science—was randomly assigned among the management councils of over 200 community water systems in an arid region of Central America. The workshop was based on more than three years of scientific research and local collaborations, and it aimed to convey downscaled climate modelling and locally informed, expert-recommended adaptation practices. Two years later, we detect no differences in pricing and non-pricing management practices of participant versus non-participant councils. These results suggest weaknesses in the common practice of using simple workshops for delivering capacity building and climate science.

Rosenblad, Kyle; Perret, Daniel; Sax, Dov

doi: 10.1038/s41558-019-0530-9pmid: N/A

Anthropogenic climate change is predicted to cause many extinctions worldwide 1 . Although species endemic to islands or archipelagos have high conservation value and are vulnerable to human impacts 2,3 , there has been no global analysis of climate-driven extinction risk focused on island endemics. Here, we use conifers as a model system to assess extinction risk among island endemics under climate projections for 2070. We employ the emerging technique of combining native and non-native occurrence data to model climatic conditions under which each species can sustain a population 4–7 and also incorporate horticultural data to model the broader range of conditions that allow short-term survival. Our projections indicate that some species will retain suitable climatic conditions, some will experience conditions completely precluding survival and others will experience intermediate-risk conditions that lead to population decline and eventual extinction. Based on different climate change models, we report island size thresholds of 400 to 20,000 km2, below which extinction risks increase. These patterns are driven by correlations among island area and the breadth of species’ realized, fundamental and tolerance niches. Notably, realized and fundamental niche breadth are positively correlated. Our results highlight management interventions needed to protect species from climate-driven extinction across islands of different sizes.

Lin, Ning

doi: 10.1038/s41558-019-0537-2pmid: N/A

Heatwaves increase in frequency and intensity with global warming. Research now shows that the sequence of a tropical cyclone followed by a heatwave may also occur more often, threatening power grids when air conditioning is needed most.