Future environmental change impacts on biodiversity conservation

Biodiversity is currently threatened by climate and land-use change. Protected areas are considered as strongholds for species, but our understanding of their effectiveness under future environmental change is limited. Here we use four different socioeconomic projections of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment to estimate the extent of habitat loss due to projected environmental change in relation to current levels of protection across biogeographical and geopolitical regions worldwide. Our results show that projected environmental change differs widely across regions and socioeconomic scenarios. Geographic patterns of past human land-use change impact are only weak predictors of forecasted environmental change. Marked disparities exist between the type and intensity of projected impact and the extent of existing protection. In particular, levels of anticipated change in relation to habitat protection are most critical at high latitudes due to climate change and the tropics and subtropics of the southern hemisphere due to land-use change. Nations with high change-protection ratios combine with weak governance, especially those in African sub-continent, warrant particularly strong conservation attention. These results highlight the importance of accounting for future environmental change when evaluating the effectiveness of the global protected area network and the pressing need for new reserves in target regions.