News release

From: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Germany

A third of animal habitats on land could experience multiple extreme events by 2085, new study

By 2085, 36 percent of species’ current habitats on land could be exposed to multiple types of climate-driven extreme events such as heatwaves, fire or floods if warming continues to rise into the latter half of the century. The findings are part of a new study published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution, authored by an international team of 18 scientists, and led by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

“I think climate change, and in particular extreme events, are still really being underestimated when it comes to conservation planning. It’s not just going to be a gradual shift of temperature over many years,” commented lead author Stefanie Heinicke, a postdoctoral researcher at PIK.

Just one heatwave, flood or fire can devastate animal populations. When multiple types of extreme events succeed one another, impacts on species and habitats are compounded. Previous literature showed following the 2019-2020 fires in Australia, there were 27-40 percent greater declines in plant and animal species in areas that had experienced a drought immediately beforehand.

However, rapidly cutting emissions to net zero could still largely prevent these impacts. In a scenario in which warming starts to reverse in the latter part of the century, land animal’s habitat that would experience multiple types of events by 2085 would be limited to just 9 percent.

“There’s still a lot of difference we can make by cutting emissions as fast as we can from today,” Heinicke added.

Impact modelling for biodiversity

The paper takes a novel approach to look at climate change’s impacts on biodiversity. It uses outputs from climate impact models, which can provide different kinds of data on more complex impacts from climate change beyond rising heat, such as flooded area and wildfire projections.

For example, the authors were able to see that by 2050 in a scenario in which warming continues into the latter half of the century, 74 percent of current animal habitats on land will be exposed to heatwaves, 16 percent to wildfire, 8 percent to droughts and 3 percent to river floods. This includes key species-rich areas in the Amazon basin, Africa and Southeast Asia.

“The wildfire projections being so significant is really notable. I don’t know of another study that has projected wildfire exposure for animals yet, so seeing that there is a bigger threat from fires than drought for example; this was a significant blind spot,” said Katja Frieler, a co-author on the paper who leads the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project, and is a research department head at PIK.