Practical Steps to Safeguard Biodiversity in a Changing Climate

Climate change is fundamentally reshaping ecosystems across the planet, pushing countless species toward the brink of extinction. While limiting greenhouse gas emissions remains critical, conservation scientists are increasingly focused on practical strategies to help biodiversity survive the changes already underway. These approaches range from reducing additional environmental stresses to more interventionist measures like relocating vulnerable species. Understanding these strategies is essential for anyone committed to protecting the natural world during this period of unprecedented environmental upheaval.

Reducing non-climatic stressors to build resilience
Addressing habitat fragmentation
Strengthening protected areas for climate resilience
Climate-smart reserve design
Adaptive management approaches
Monitoring and adaptive management
The importance of real-time data
Assisted migration and managed relocation
When assisted migration becomes necessary
Risks and considerations
Ex-situ conservation as a last resort
Seed banks and genetic preservation
Captive breeding and reintroduction
Global and local collaboration
The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework
Indigenous knowledge and community involvement
An integrated approach for an uncertain future

Reducing non-climatic stressors to build resilience

One of the most effective ways to help species cope with climate change is to reduce other pressures they face simultaneously. Human-caused exploitation, pollution, and habitat loss are already threatening biodiversity worldwide, and climate change intensifies these existing threats. When species must contend with multiple stressors at once, their ability to adapt to changing temperatures and precipitation patterns diminishes significantly.

Research indicates that reducing global change drivers beyond climate could increase overall biodiversity resilience to warming temperatures. For example, limiting pollution in waterways gives aquatic species a better chance of surviving temperature increases. Similarly, controlling invasive species helps native populations maintain the population sizes they need to adapt genetically to new conditions.

Addressing habitat fragmentation

Habitat fragmentation poses a particular challenge because it restricts species’ ability to move to more suitable locations as conditions change. Human activity has already altered over 70 percent of all ice-free land, primarily for food production. When landscapes become a patchwork of isolated habitat fragments, species that need to shift their ranges cannot easily disperse to cooler areas at higher elevations or latitudes.

Conservation strategies increasingly focus on maintaining or restoring habitat connectivity through corridors and buffer zones. These allow species to move across landscapes as climate conditions shift. Wildlife corridors may reduce extinction risk by enabling species to passively shift to new geographic ranges and by reinforcing species distributions in a metapopulation context. The challenge lies in determining where to site these corridors most effectively.

Strengthening protected areas for climate resilience

Protected areas have long been conservation’s cornerstone, but climate change is forcing managers to rethink how these spaces function. Traditional protected areas are generally static, which may make them less useful as species move away from reserves designated for them. Shifting seasons and extreme weather events could make conditions unviable within protected areas for species unable to relocate.

However, research using NASA satellite data has demonstrated that protected areas contain significantly higher carbon stocks than unprotected forests. These higher stocks primarily result from avoided emissions due to reduced deforestation and degradation within protected boundaries. Terrestrial protected areas hold carbon stocks roughly equivalent to one year of global fossil fuel emissions, underscoring their importance for both biodiversity and climate mitigation.

Climate-smart reserve design

Climate-smart approaches to protected area design include protecting species’ future habitats, identifying climate refugia, establishing connectivity corridors, and safeguarding areas with high adaptation potential. Climate refugia are locations where conditions remain relatively stable despite regional changes, providing havens where species can persist.

Scientific reviews recommend five key strategies for climate-adapted protected areas: ensuring sufficient connectivity between reserves, protecting climate refugia, prioritizing larger protected areas over smaller fragmented ones, safeguarding areas predicted to become important for biodiversity in the future, and complementing permanent protection with temporary measures where needed.

Adaptive management approaches

A review of 172 marine protected area management plans across 52 countries found that most already contain underlying principles for promoting climate resilience, even when climate change is not explicitly mentioned. These include long-term objectives, threat-reduction strategies, and monitoring programs. Core components of adaptive management relevant to climate change include clearly defining objectives, assessing current and future threats, implementing systematic spatial design, monitoring outcomes, and regularly re-evaluating management measures.

Maintaining the health of protected area features is regarded as a key factor influencing resilience. The approach can be summarized as making protected areas more numerous, bigger, better connected, and in improved condition. For both terrestrial and marine protected areas, these principles form the foundation of climate adaptation strategies.

Monitoring and adaptive management

Robust monitoring systems are essential for detecting early warning signs of climate stress and enabling timely interventions. Predicting biodiversity responses to climate change has become an extremely active research field, with predictions helping alert scientists and decision makers to potential future risks while supporting development of proactive conservation strategies.

Effective monitoring tracks multiple indicators, including population sizes, species distributions, phenological changes, and ecosystem health metrics. When monitoring reveals that a population is declining or a species is disappearing from part of its range, managers can implement targeted interventions before the situation becomes critical.

The importance of real-time data

Conservation may be falling behind other sectors in implementing and assessing climate change adaptation actions. Protected area managers urgently need resources to assess and report meaningful indicators of success. Better monitoring and reporting of outcomes are essential for developing evidence about which actions are most effective.

Modern technologies like remote sensing, environmental DNA sampling, and citizen science platforms are expanding monitoring capabilities. These tools allow conservationists to track changes across vast areas and detect shifts in species composition that might otherwise go unnoticed until populations collapse.

Assisted migration and managed relocation

For some species, remaining in their current habitats may no longer be viable as climate conditions change faster than they can adapt or naturally disperse. Assisted migration involves human-assisted movement of species in response to climate change and represents one management option for addressing this challenge. The rapid pace of warming may exceed the ability of many species to adapt in place or migrate naturally to suitable habitats.

Assisted migration applies to translocations both within species ranges (called assisted gene flow) and beyond species ranges (called assisted colonization). Within-range movements help populations adapt by introducing genetic material from populations already adapted to warmer conditions. Beyond-range movements establish populations in new areas that have become climatically suitable.

When assisted migration becomes necessary

Assisted migration is a conservation strategy that involves moving endangered species to new areas when their native habitat becomes too hot, too dry, too salty, or otherwise unsuitable. This approach has gained particular attention for species that cannot move on their own, such as trees, or those with highly restricted ranges.

Some species are mobile and flexible enough to move or adapt independently, perhaps shifting uphill or toward the poles. Others lack the capacity to change as quickly as the climate and ecosystem around them and may require human intervention. The endangered Florida torreya, for instance, has been planted by volunteers in North Carolina and Georgia since 2008, where the trees appear to be thriving in their new locations.

Risks and considerations

Assisted migration remains controversial because it challenges traditional conservation principles that prioritize keeping species in their native ranges. One concern is that relocated species might become invasive in their new habitats, outcompeting native organisms. Another worry is that transplanted species might fail to thrive outside their original ecological context.

Genomic techniques are adding new dimensions to assisted migration decisions. These tools can identify populations with genetic traits that make them more likely to survive in future climate conditions, helping managers select the most appropriate source populations for translocations. While conservation biologists have long used genetic tools to maintain population diversity, genomic approaches can now target both neutral and adaptive regions of the genome.

Ex-situ conservation as a last resort

When species face imminent extinction and cannot be adequately protected in the wild, ex-situ conservation provides a critical safety net. Ex-situ conservation means preserving components of biological diversity outside their natural habitats through techniques including gene banks, captive breeding programs, and botanical gardens. These approaches should complement rather than replace in-situ conservation.

Seed banks provide insurance against threats to plants in situ including habitat loss, invasive species, over-exploitation, pollution, disease, and climate change. The storage of seeds is one of the most widespread and valuable ex-situ approaches because seeds of many species can survive for hundreds of years under conditions of low humidity and temperature.

Seed banks and genetic preservation

The Millennium Seed Bank Partnership at Kew Gardens is the largest ex-situ plant conservation program globally, targeting plants and regions most at risk from human activities and climate change. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway focuses specifically on food plants, storing backup copies of seeds held in gene banks worldwide.

Through climate modeling, it is becoming increasingly possible to predict future climatic conditions for specific areas, and seed banks can potentially help identify and access genetic materials that will adapt to these future conditions. The availability of germplasm collections from diverse climate gradients makes seed banks important sources of genetic material for assisted migration and enrichment planting programs.

Captive breeding and reintroduction

For animal species facing extinction, captive breeding programs maintain populations that can potentially be reintroduced once threats are addressed. Conservation seed banks can contribute to breaking extinction cycles by preserving genetic resources that serve as the main asset for species reintroduction, supporting ecological restoration and reforestation efforts.

Although ex-situ conservation alone is not the answer to the biodiversity and climate crisis, these collections offer unique opportunities to study evolutionary processes and species responses to environmental change. The genetic snapshots captured in seed banks and breeding programs provide irreplaceable resources for future restoration when conditions improve or new habitats become available.

Global and local collaboration

Addressing biodiversity loss in a changing climate requires coordinated action across scales, from local communities to international agreements. Climate change and biodiversity loss are part of an interlinked triple planetary crisis that includes pollution. These challenges need to be tackled together to advance sustainable development goals and secure a viable future.

Countries should submit National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans that collectively bring land and sea under conservation from current levels to 30 percent by 2030. These plans should support climate commitments and vice versa, reflecting the fundamental interconnection between climate action and nature protection.

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted in December 2022, includes steps to tackle biodiversity loss worldwide, including addressing climate change and pollution. This framework should work in synergy with the Paris Agreement on climate, recognizing that delivering on biodiversity goals contributes to climate action while full implementation of climate commitments is needed for biodiversity success.

The framework establishes the “30×30” target: protecting 30 percent of land and ocean by 2030 while mobilizing billions for conservation. A fund launched in 2025 aims to raise an additional $200 billion annually by 2030 to close the global biodiversity finance gap, with contributions from entities making commercial use of genetic resources.

Indigenous knowledge and community involvement

Indigenous peoples are guardians of nature, and their traditional knowledge represents a living library of biodiversity conservation. Conservation efforts increasingly recognize that protecting biodiversity requires involving local communities and respecting indigenous rights. These communities often possess detailed understanding of ecosystem dynamics that complements scientific knowledge.

Climate adaptation initiatives are working with local communities, traditionally marginalized groups, women, and local authorities to design and implement nature-based solutions. This approach recognizes that effective conservation must be inclusive and address social as well as ecological dimensions of the climate-biodiversity crisis.

An integrated approach for an uncertain future

No single strategy will suffice to protect biodiversity from climate change. Climate change interventions can generate substantial co-benefits across biodiversity conservation, water security, food system resilience, and human health when strategically aligned with multiple objectives. The most effective approaches combine reduced stressors, strengthened protected areas, robust monitoring, assisted migration where necessary, and ex-situ preservation as insurance.

The scale of the challenge is immense. Studies suggest climate change could surpass habitat destruction as the greatest global threat to biodiversity over the coming decades. Yet the diversity of available tools and growing international commitment to addressing the climate-biodiversity crisis provide grounds for cautious optimism. Success depends on implementing these strategies quickly, at scale, and with the flexibility to adapt as conditions continue to change.

What do you think? Which of these conservation strategies do you believe deserves more attention and investment in your region? How can individuals contribute to biodiversity protection alongside larger institutional efforts?

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Table of Contents

Reducing non-climatic stressors to build resilience 🔗

Addressing habitat fragmentation 🔗

Strengthening protected areas for climate resilience 🔗

Climate-smart reserve design 🔗

Adaptive management approaches 🔗

Monitoring and adaptive management 🔗

The importance of real-time data 🔗

Assisted migration and managed relocation 🔗

When assisted migration becomes necessary 🔗

Risks and considerations 🔗

Ex-situ conservation as a last resort 🔗

Seed banks and genetic preservation 🔗

Captive breeding and reintroduction 🔗

Global and local collaboration 🔗

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework 🔗

Indigenous knowledge and community involvement 🔗

An integrated approach for an uncertain future 🔗