CBCS PhD candidate
Climate change and biodiversity loss are intertwined global problems, where failure to address one often exacerbates the effects of the other. Protected areas – among other area-based management tools – are designed to separate biodiversity from threats, but they have done little to ameliorate climate-change impacts. Even worse, climate change also reduces the effectiveness of existing protected areas. Despite advances in climate-change ecology, conservation science has been slow to translate these insights into action. As we move towards protecting 30% of land, waters and seas by 2030 (also known as the 30 x 30 initiative), we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to design new protected areas that consider climate change from their outset.
Figure credit: Tin Buenafe.
Synthesising the current approaches
Conservation planning refers to the structured process of identifying, assigning and monitoring areas for conservation or management. Spatial prioritisation – the process of identifying priority areas where specific conservation and/or management measures can be implemented – is one crucial step of conservation planning, where new protected areas that could be established are identified.
While several reviews have synthesised how climate change has been incorporated in different steps of the broad conservation planning process, approaches that explicitly incorporate climate change in climate-smart spatial prioritization have not been synthesised since Jones et al. (2016).
In this review, we scoured more than one hundred peer-reviewed articles that used climate projections to inform their spatial prioritisations. We synthesised four key approaches that explicitly incorporate climate change in spatial prioritisation: protecting species’ future habitats; protecting climate refugia (areas projected to buffer biodiversity from climate change); protecting areas that facilitate climate connectivity (shifts and changes in species’ climate niches); and protecting areas that foster natural adaptation to climate change. We also provide actionable guidance for applying these “climate-smart” approaches in spatial prioritisation, resulting in protected areas that are more resilient to the changing climate.
Overcoming challenges
However, integrating climate change into conservation planning is not without its challenges, limiting the uptake of these climate-smart approaches in on-the-ground conservation planning. Appropriately capturing uncertainty in climate projections and species’ responses remains a hurdle in climate-smart conservation planning. There are noticeable data gaps that limit the number of climate-smart approaches that can be applied in data-poor regions, such as the high seas and the Global South. Finally, navigating the seemingly limitless complexities and trade-offs of the different climate-smart approaches presents a considerable challenge. However, these challenges can be overcome. We call attention to the ways these challenges can be circumvented, such as properly accounting for uncertainty by considering multiple emission scenarios and using an ensemble of climate models, taking advantage of approaches that use measures of climate exposure from climate projections as proxies whenever species-specific biodiversity data are not available, and applying “bet-hedging” strategies in conservation planning where multiple (potentially contrasting) climate-smart approaches could be included in the same protected-area design.
Figure credit: Tin Buenafe.
Looking ahead
We end this review by highlighting promising ways to integrate advances in climate-change ecology into conservation planning: 1. Developing climate-smart strategies applicable to data-poor regions 2. Embedding climate connectivity into protected-area designs 3. Enhancing reproducibility of conservation-planning frameworks 4. Promoting transboundary collaboration in conservation planning.
This is the first paper coming out of my PhD and I am ecstatic! Leading this review was a very intense but fruitful journey. I am nothing but grateful to my supervisors, especially Professor Anthony Richardson and Associate Professor Daniel Dunn, for their guidance and help as we navigated the process. I am also very grateful to my wonderful co-authors, many of whom are from CBCS (past and present). Their collective insights helped me shape the review into something that could be more meaningful for different interest groups in conservation. I hope that scientists, planners, managers and practitioners find some useful guidance in this piece and that this review might serve as a stepping stone towards bridging advances in climate-change ecology in applied, protected-area design.
References
Buenafe KC, Dunn DC, Metaxas A, Schoeman DS, Everett JD, Pidd A, Hanson JO, Bentley LK, Wook Kim S, Neubert S, Scales KL, Dabala A, Brito-Morales I & Richardson AJ. (2025). Current approaches and future opportunities for climate-smart protected areas. Nature Reviews Biodiversity. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44358-025-00041-0
Jones, KR, Watson JEM, Possingham HP, Klein CJ. (2016). Incorporating climate change into spatial conservation prioritisation: A review. Biological Conservation 194, 121–130. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2015.12.008
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