Climate adaptation: think globally,act locally

摘要

Biologists should not over-commit time and effort in establishing broader climate change links to local ecological impacts, say an international team of United States, Spanish and Australian researchers. Instead, biologists should aim to achieve a balance between identifying and understanding climate change impacts, and planning for the consequences.1 'There is little point in focusing on fully identifying the climate impacts while losing species,' says co-author Dr Elvira Poloczanska, an environment scientist with CSIRO's Climate Adaptation Flagship. 'Biologists have already shown globally that the flowering and breeding times and distributions of plants and animals are changing. This is consistent with universal atmospheric warming and elevated greenhouse gas emissions likely arising from human activity. But if you scale this down to the local level with individual species, the application is questionable,' explains Dr Poloczanska.