Biodiversity

This is a recording of Session Three of the virtual National Adaptation Forum Heat Stress Series, brought to you by EcoAdapt. 

Rising temperatures have significant impacts on ecosystems. This session will consider the effects of heat stress on a range of species and ecosystems across North America, including aquatic, terrestrial, and marine habitats, and natural resources management strategies to adapt to these challenges to protect species as well as ecosystem services that support human communities.

Coral reefs provide food and livelihoods for hundreds of millions of people as well as harbor some of the highest regions of biodiversity in the ocean. However, overexploitation, land‐use change and other local anthropogenic threats to coral reefs have left many degraded. Additionally, coral reefs are faced with the dual emerging threats of ocean warming and acidification due to rising CO2 emissions, with dire predictions that they will not survive the century.

Coral reefs are among the world’s most endangered ecosystems. Coral mortality can result from ocean warming or other climate-related events such as coral bleaching and intense hurricanes. While resilient coral reefs can recover from these impacts as has been documented in coral reefs throughout the tropical Indo-Pacific, no similar reef-wide recovery has ever been reported for the Caribbean.

Strong decreases in greenhouse gas emissions are required to meet the reduction trajectory resolved within the 2015 Paris Agreement. However, even these decreases will not avert serious stress and damage to life on Earth, and additional steps are needed to boost the resilience of ecosystems, safeguard their wildlife, and protect their capacity to supply vital goods and services.

The impacts of climate change and the socioecological challenges they present are ubiquitous and increasingly severe. Practical efforts to operationalize climate-responsive design and management in the global network of marine protected areas (MPAs) are required to ensure long-term effectiveness for safeguarding marine biodiversity and ecosystem services. Here, the authors review progress in integrating climate change adaptation into MPA design and management and provide eight recommendations to expedite this process.

Marine protected areas (MPAs), like their terrestrial counterparts, face a wide range of climate change stressors that challenge traditional management strategies. Ocean acidification, dynamic boundaries, high connectivity, and other complexities create climate management challenges unique to the ocean system. Further, there is a concerning disconnect between global oceanic climate impacts and the relative lack of experience and action needed to address these stressors at local and regional scales.

The America's Red Rock Wilderness Act (ARRWA) proposes the protection of around 9 million acres of public lands in Utah under the Wilderness Act of 1964, which is designed to permanently protect intact, high-quality ecosystems. The proposed wilderness lands are dominated by desert, grassland, and shrubland ecosystems within a landscape characterized by rugged mountains and red rock canyons, cliffs, mesas, and other natural formations.

In a collaborative effort to advance climate adaptation resources available to wetland practitioners, the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts (WICCI) and the Northern Institute of Applied Climate Science (NIACS) have partnered to create adaptation resources for non-forested wetland management. This effort is also supported by the USDA Northern Forests Climate Hub.