Saving the Future for Biodiversity

Throughout the history of conservation, efforts to save nature have focused on identifying and protecting places with high levels of biodiversity.

Climate change, however, has thrown a large wrench into that strategy.

Nature is on the move like never before. As warmer temperatures, increased flooding and other climate impacts alter and destroy habitat, species are being forced to find new places to live. Diverse plants and animals that thrive in one landscape today may end up living in a very different landscape in the future.

Scientists, in fact, have found that in North America, species are moving an average of 11 miles north and 36 feet higher in elevation each decade to find more hospitable places to live. 

Sports metaphors may be useful here. In ice hockey or football (soccer), it’s passing to an open space of ice or field where you expect a teammate to go. In conservation, it’s identifying and protecting the most climate-resilient "neighborhoods" for biodiversity — and the “highways” species will take to move between them. 

I and more than 150 scientific colleagues inside and outside of The Nature Conservancy have been working to do just that. Our new research maps a network of landscapes across the continental United States with unique topographies, geologies and other characteristics that can help withstand climate impacts.

This roadmap of “natural highways and neighborhoods” shows where plant and animal species have the best chance to move away from growing climate threats and find new places to call home. 

For example, in North Carolina, the roadmap was used by the Sandhills Conservation Partnership – a collaboration between the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the North Carolina Forest Service, Fort Bragg, The Nature Conservancy and others – to expand their area of work to include the Uwharrie Mountains. Many longleaf-associated species such as the red-cockaded woodpecker have disappeared from the Uwharries due to a lack of fire management, but the roadmap identified the area as being highly resilient due to its varying soils and topography. The Partnership decided to expand their conservation work to include the Uwharries to ensure it could provide safe homes to the Sandhills’ wide diversity of species as they migrate away from climate impacts. 

Our challenge is to accelerate the pace and scale of conservation and conserve a representative network of resilient, connected lands and waters that will allow nature to adapt to climate change.

Climate change is forcing all of us to rethink our strategies to ensure the full diversity of nature —including humanity — will be able to thrive for future generations. This roadmap of natural highways and neighborhoods provides a tool to help us do that. But true success will depend on collaboration.

To achieve conservation at the scale needed, we must collaborate with people and organizations across both the public and private sectors. Conservation success depends not only on landscape diversity and connectivity, but diversity and connectivity across institutions and communities.