Reassessing Conservation Goals in a Changing Climate (Perspectives‪)‬

Climate change poses a hierarchy of significant challenges for conservation policy. First, the sheer scale of climate change calls for conservation efforts to be vastly stepped up. Second, the pace and extent of expected climate change will probably undermine the effectiveness of traditional conservation tools focused on protecting designated areas from human intrusion. The search for novel conservation strategies that will stand up to global shifts in climate highlights a third challenge: New conditions and new tools require a reassessment of our conservation goals. This third challenge has so far not been the subject of much debate, but merits closer and more systematic attention. The debate may be uncomfortable, but avoiding it complicates the tasks of prioritizing conservation efforts and choosing conservation tools. More important, the failure to explicitly identify conservation goals that acknowledge climate change is likely to lead to failure to achieve those goals. The threat of climate change to conservation policy is daunting. Climate change is altering habitats on a grand scale. Species around the world are shifting their ranges to accommodate warming trends. Under any reasonable projection of greenhouse gas emissions, the rate of change will accelerate in coming decades. For species with small populations or specialized habitat requirements, climate change poses special challenges. Although the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently declined to list it as endangered or threatened, the American pika remains an excellent example. The pika, a heat-sensitive mammal that is native to the mountaintops of the American West, can only move so far uphill and cannot migrate to higher or more northerly mountains because it cannot survive the intervening low-elevation habitat.