Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Then there is 'ecological accommodation'. This relates to allowing ecological
change and is important in the context of global climate change as ecological change
across the planet is a virtual certainty. This modifies our local ecological conserva-
tionist brief when formulating site-management strategies to that of considering how
to build in ecosystem resilience to manage ecological resistance in order to allow
accommodation. In practical terms this means considering a number of scenarios,
especially as the IPCC warn us to be wary of climate surprises.
Yet even with the most astute conservationists, because human pressures are so
great and becoming greater, the management of reserves and the landscape to create
a matrix needed to facilitate species' climate change-driven range migration will be
difficult (as we shall see in Chapters 7 and 8). Even so, this is a possible conservation
tool currently being advocated by a number of ecologists (Lovejoy and Hannah,
2005). Certainly, the trend towards the end of the 20th century among ecologists was
to have regard for managing ecology on the scale of the landscape, rather than purely
site by site.
The biological impacts of climate change discussed in this section have been them-
atic: generalities that apply to many places. To re-cap, these include phenological
changes, species migration (and limitations), changes in ecological communities
(recombinant ecology) and the problems of an increasingly anthropogenically frag-
mented landscape. But because the determinants of biological effects of climate
change are so multi-dimensional, they can only really be considered in the context
of specific regional climate change: one size does not fit all. The next three sections
provide case studies of likely change and impacts for three areas: North America, the
UK and Australasia.
6.2 Casestudy:climateandnaturalsystems
intheUSAandCanada
The year 2001 saw a major policy study entitled Climate Change Impacts on the
United States by the National Assessment Synthesis Team from the US Global Change
Research Program (USGCRP), although it was actually released in 2000 with a draft
for consultation also released earlier that year. A second report was published by
the USGCRP in 2009 entitled Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States .
The first 2000-1 (hereafter 2001) report was, in effect, a stock-take of US scientific
understanding at the turn of the millennium of how climate change might affect the
USA. The second report confirmed and extended the first's conclusions, and affirmed
them with updated scientific evidence.
The 2001 report concluded that the USA would very probably get substantially
warmer, with temperatures rising in the 21st century more rapidly than in the previous
10 000 years. There would also be more rain, some of it in heavy downpours, even
though some parts of the USA would become more arid. Drought in some parts
may become more common as the effects of temperature rise on water evaporation
outstrip increases in precipitation. It noted that reduced summer run-off coupled with
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