Using climate change to restore biodiversity

The Arctic is one of the most rapidly warming regions on the planet—a trend that is likely to continue. This poses challenges for policy makers, because the current species composition of the Arctic is unlikely to persist indefinitely. How do you sustain ecosystems for future generations, if you know they will be different from today? Two frameworks provide useful guidelines. Climate, ecosystems, and society have always been tightly linked and will likely continue to be so in the future. Therefore, if climate is changing, it is just as important to look at the links between ecosystems and society as between climate and ecosystems. Secondly, ecosystem services (rather than individual species) may be the level of biodiversity that is most appropriate to manage in a rapidly changing social-ecological system. We are certain that species distributions will change. Some species will disappear or move north; new species will arrive. Attempting to prevent these changes from occurring would make the system more vulnerable to large future changes. However, the same general categories of ecosystem services will likely always be present, regardless of climate change. Managing for those benefits maintains tight coupling between climate, ecosystems and society. Climate change can be used as a mechanism to facilitate recovery of biodiversity that has been lost due to past management practices. In Sweden, for example, stand-level management and landscape corridors can generate appropriate habitat and facilitate northward migration of functional types (e.g., coarse-woody-debris-based food chains) that were eliminated by intensive forest management.