Research
This page contains some of the most recent research and statistics on climate change, as well as its impact on conservation challenges.
NASA Global Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet
Scientific Consensus: Earth's Climate Is Warming
This page from NASA lists hundreds of scientists and scientific organizations, academies, government and international agencies that have publicly declared consensus on the existence of climate change.
Evidence: How Do We Know Climate Change Is Real?
This page from NASA outlines some of the most important scientific evidence demonstrating the existence and progression of a range of issues related to climate change, including global temperature rise, ocean temperature rise, acidification and global sea level rise, melting ice caps and an increase in extreme weather events, among other indicators.
This graph, based on the comparison of atmospheric samples contained in ice cores and more recent direct measurements, provides evidence that atmospheric CO2 has increased since the Industrial Revolution. (Credit: Luthi, D., et al.. 2008; Etheridge, D.M., et al. 2010; Vostok ice core data/J.R. Petit et al.; NOAA Mauna Loa CO2 record.)
Temperature data showing rapid warming in the past few decades, the latest data going up to 2022. According to NASA, 2016 and 2020 are tied for the warmest year since 1880, continuing a long-term trend of rising global temperatures. On top of that, the nine most recent years have been the hottest. Credit: NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies
“Human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change. The IPCC prepares comprehensive Assessment Reports about the state of scientific, technical and socio-economic knowledge on climate change, its impacts and future risks, and options for reducing the rate at which climate change is taking place.
2023’s Synthesis Report states: “Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming, with global surface temperature reaching 1.1°C above 1850–1900 in 2011–2020”
“Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health (very high confidence). There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all (very high confidence).”
Targeting climate diversity in conservation planning to build resilience to climate change (2015)
Nicole E. Heller, Jason Kreitler, David D. Ackerly, Stuart B. Weiss, Amanda Recinos, Ryan Branciforte, Lorraine E. Flint, Alan L. Flint, Elisabeth Micheli
Climate change is raising challenging concerns for systematic conservation planning. Some conservation scientists argue that planning should focus on protecting the abiotic diversity in the landscape, which drives patterns of biological diversity, rather than focusing on the distribution of biotic species, which shift in response to climate change. Climate is one important abiotic driver of biodiversity patterns, as different climates host different biological communities and genetic pools.
This study compared the potential resilience of networks by examining two factors: the range of climate space captured, and climatic stability to 18 future climates, reflecting different emission scenarios and global climate models. The research suggests that utilizing high-resolution climate and hydrological data in conservation planning improves the likely resilience of biodiversity to climate change. This experiment can be replicated in different areas to suggest new conservation priorities.
Climate, climate change and range boundaries (2010)
Chris D. Thomas, University of York , 2010
This 2010 study examined the extent to which climate, and hence climate change, contributes to the positions of species’ range boundaries (where they live). It found that the majority of species’ boundaries shifted in a direction that is concordant with being a response to climate change; 84% of all species have expanded in a polewards direction as the climate has warmed, which represents an excess of 68% of species after taking account of the fact that some species may shift in this direction for non-climatic reasons.
Assessing the impacts of projected climate change onbiodiversity in the protected areas of western North America (2015)
Jesse G. R. Langdon, Joshua J. Lawler
Protected areas are a fundamental component of many conservation strategies as they safeguard some of the best examples of natural landscapes in many regions, provide important habitat for rare and threatened species, and serve as a refuge from a human-dominated world. As climates continue to change, species distributions, ecological communities, and ecosystems will be altered.
This study assessed future projected changes in temperature and precipitation, shifts in major vegetation types, and vertebrate species turnover for the protected areas of the Pacific Northwestern region of North America. Protected areas expected to experience the least change are at low elevations near the coast and throughout the Coastal Mountains, whereas areas expected to experience the most change are found at higher elevations in the Rocky Mountains and Great Basin regions. This experiment highlights the importance of developing appropriate, location-specific, climate-adaptation strategies in response to future environmental climate change.