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 School of Geography and the Environment

Biodiversity and Climate Adaptation

alpine plant

With increasing pressures on our environment as a result of climate change and anthropogenic impacts, our research aims to increase understanding of complex human-climate-ecosystem interactions. The ECI's Biodiversity and Climate Adaptation research group is at the forefront of integrating and improving techniques for the observation and projection of the effects of environmental change on species, ecosystems and the services they provide at the international and national level. These results are feeding into the conservation management and policy areas. It is also researching adaptation options for biodiversity and how mitigation and adaptation measures in other sectors might impact on biodiversity. More specifically we are involved in:

  • using sectoral and integrated modelling techniques to project changes in the potential distributions of species and ecosystems at local, regional and global scales and to assess their adaptive capacity and vulnerability to climate change;
  • investigating the role of adaptation and mitigation measures in different sectors in offsetting the projected changes and their impacts on biodiversity;
  • costing adaptation in natural ecosystems to climate change;
  • developing a user-friendly, interactive and web-based platform for stakeholder-led climate change adaptation and vulnerability assessment which explicitly evaluates cross-sectoral interactions between the key sectors driving landscape change in Europe;
  • quantifying the contribution of different organisms, and the effects of various drivers of change, on the provision of ecosystem services;
  • assessing the implications of the above for conservation policy and management.

Projects

  • CLIMSAVE: CLimate change Integrated assessment Methodology for cross-Sectoral Adaptation and Vulnerability in Europe
    2010-2013

    CLIMSAVE is a European research project funded by the EU to assess climate change impacts and adaptation strategies across six key sectors in Europe: agriculture, forestry, biodiversity, urban, water and coasts. Linkages between these sectors are being represented within a series of integrated models within a user friendly, web-based Integrated Assessment Platform (IAP). The IAP is being designed so that stakeholders can use it themselves to explore and understand the interactions between climate change impacts in different sectors, building their capacity to identify cross-sectoral vulnerability to climate change and determine how it might be reduced by various cost-effective adaptation options. See climsave website.

  • BESAFE (Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services: Arguments for our future Environment)
    2010-2013

    The project will use case studies to investigate how much importance people attribute to alternative arguments for the protection of biodiversity and in particular how this relates to ecosystem services. It will also examine the interactions of environmental protection policies between governance levels and will consider the contribution that valuing ecosystem services can make in demonstrating the value of biodiversity. The results will be used as guidance on the effectiveness of alternative arguments and formulating of biodiversity protection strategies applied at the level of EU and member countries.