Potential shifts of climate zones in global terrestrial protected areas and implications for biodiversity conservation

Climate change is driving broad-scale redistribution of life on earth, greatly undermining the effectiveness of protected areas in conserving and restoring global biodiversity. Strategic and adaptive conservation planning that explicitly considers climatic shifts is critical to address the ongoing biodiversity crisis and achieve future conservation goals. To assess exposure risks of global protected areas under climate change and promote understanding of spatiotemporal patterns of climate shifts, we apply bioclimatic classification based on downscaled historical climate data and model projections under future scenarios, and present a velocity measure of climate zone shifts with fine temporal and spatial scales to represent potential movement of species required to track bioclimatic changes on a topographic surface over time. Under RCP8.5 scenario, 38% of global protected land area in more than three fourths of the terrestrial protected areas, will undergo pronounced changes in bioclimatic conditions at constantly accelerating rates during the century. Moreover, protected lands are experiencing heightened climate change exposure from novel (8.3% of global protected land) and disappearing (6.6%) climates, shifts of climates outside protected area networks (7.6%), transition to human dominated land use (5.7%). Protected areas distributed across arid (B) and boreal (D) climate zones, in mid latitudes of North America, Europe, Russia, and Africa, with strict management categories, are more likely to be facing substantial changes in climate zones. Relationships with attributes of protected area also suggest increased vulnerability for small protected areas, high elevation protected lands with complex topography, and protected areas located in biodiversity hotspots. Taken together, our findings of climate zone shifts and exposure assessment of protected areas can inform climate adaptation planning and biodiversity conservation prioritization.