Conservation Beyond 1.5°C
A changing climate doesn't just make conservation more urgent. It changes what ‘enough’ conservation means.
August set another record in terms of climate.
This week Earth.Org reported that August 2026 matched July 2023 as the hottest month ever recorded worldwide, the global average temperature having risen by about 1.65°C (3.0°F) compared to the preindustrial baseline.
Another record-hot month would be troubling enough.
However, it was not the temperature record that stopped me.
Something much larger has changed.
For the last ten years the threshold of 1.5°C (2.7°F) above preindustrial levels has been the standard against which international efforts to limit global warming are measured. Climate science is now becoming more aware of the possibility that the world will go beyond this threshold.
A major scientific review published last year concluded that limited progress in reducing emissions makes exceeding 1.5°C almost inevitable. This month, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) went further: its new Limiting Overshoot report concludes that exceedance is now widely assessed as unavoidable under current policies and alternative near-term trajectories. Its best-case scenario has warming peaking around 1.8°C (3.2°F). Other pathways exceed 2°C (3.6°F).
Take that in for a moment.
The environmental threshold which the world has been desperately trying not to cross over the past decade is now increasingly becoming the one we will have to live in, and conservation will have to operate within.
For conservation, that changes everything.
The landscapes we know and love are changing—and they will continue to change well into the future.
That raises a question conservation can no longer avoid:
Are we planning conservation for the landscapes we know today—or for the landscapes they are becoming?
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Four Ways to Respond
Moving beyond 1.5°C does not mean the climate problem is lost.
What this means is that the response becomes more demanding.
The Climate Overshoot Commission divides the various responses into four main categories: reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, adapting to the climate impacts that cannot be avoided, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and investigating solar radiation modification.
The various methods serve different purposes. It is still essential to cut emissions since this tackles the root cause of ongoing warming. Adaptation helps to reduce vulnerability to effects which can no longer be avoided. Carbon dioxide removal involves taking carbon that has already built up in the atmosphere and storing it somewhere else. Solar radiation modification would try to cut down warming by reflecting some of the incoming sunlight, but the risks, advantages, and way it is governed are still very uncertain.
Conservation plays an important role in this response.
We are not merely trying to save forests, grasslands, wetlands, soils, coastal ecosystems, and other functioning natural systems from the effects of climate change.
They are already helping protect us from it.
They hold enormous stores of carbon and continue pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Protecting those stores helps avoid additional emissions, while restoring ecosystems can increase biological carbon removal through plants and soils.
Conservation cannot substitute for rapidly reducing fossil-fuel emissions.
But neither can we address climate change while continuing to destroy the natural systems that store carbon and help remove it from the atmosphere.
Nature is part of the planet's climate infrastructure.
There is another side to this relationship.
The natural systems helping us confront climate change must themselves survive the climate change already underway.
Nature Needs Room to Move
People devoted to conservation spend their entire careers gaining knowledge about specific places.
We learn about their rivers and wetlands, their forests and grasslands, the species that return every spring and the places where wildlife gathers.
We fight to protect those places because we want them to endure.
But climate change is confronting us with a painful reality:
Endurance may require change.
Imagine a species whose suitable climate is moving northward or upslope. Protecting where it lives today may not be enough if there is nowhere for it to go tomorrow.
A wetland squeezed between changing water levels and development cannot simply move. Wildlife isolated within a protected area cannot follow suitable conditions if the surrounding landscape has become impassable.
The boundaries we've drawn to protect nature remain fixed, even as nature itself moves.
The distributions of species change. Habitats rearrange. The regimes of fire and other disturbances alter. Some areas become less suitable whereas others become newly important. Climate refugia might offer protection against changing conditions, while the links between habitats will decide whether or not species have a place to go.
That changes one of conservation's most basic questions.
For much of its history, conservation has understandably concentrated on protecting the places where biodiversity exists today.
We still need to do that.
But increasingly, we also have to think about where species and ecological processes may need to be tomorrow.
What kinds of places could serve as refugia? What kinds of connections will enable species to move? And what places which currently appear quite ordinary might end up being important thirty or fifty years from now?
It is impossible for us to give perfect answers to those questions.
And that uncertainty matters.
Conservation has always been an expression of hope. Hope that the places and species we love can endure.
Climate change is forcing us to reconsider what enduring actually means.
We cannot say precisely what the landscapes in the year 2050 are going to be like, and I find that uncertainty disturbing.
But conservation has never been concerned with certainty.
It's essentially about having the belief that the future is worth fighting for.
The struggle in a changing climate must also involve giving nature the freedom to change as well.
Room for species to move.
Room for ecosystems to reorganize.
Room for possibilities we cannot see from where we stand today.
Climate change doesn't simply mean nature needs more protection.
Nature needs room to adapt.
Which leaves us with the question I'll take up next week:
How much room will nature need?
