Climate Change and Wildlife Impacts

Richard Burkmar (1) (2), Lancashire WT (3) and JP Trenque (4)

Climate change is almost certainly the most significant challenge facing nature conservation, with the potential to have significant impacts on the future of UK and global biodiversity.

Although wildlife has had to adapt to naturally driven climatic fluctuations in the past, the scale and rate of predicted change over the next century will place much greater pressures on habitats and species. More importantly, human activities have broken up the large areas of natural habitat that acted as buffers against change, with intensive agriculture or urban development now acting as a barrier to movement of wildlife.  The small and fragmented habitats that result are more vulnerable to threats from further land use pressure and the impacts of climate change.

The Wildlife Trusts have produced a document which sets out their core policy on climate change together with a discussion of the basic principles that underlie the policy choices made.  The Wildlife Trusts Climate Change Policy (63kb).

The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, is a 700-page report released on October 30, 2006 by economist Sir Nicholas Stern for the British government, which discusses the effect of climate change and global warming on the world economy. Although not the first economic report on global warming, it is significant as the largest and most widely known and discussed report of its kind.  Click here for the Stern Report.