Wildlife in a Warming World

Many decades of burning fossil fuels, coupled with rampant deforestation, are having an undeniable impact on our home.

In all regions of the world we’re seeing yesterday’s theoretical dangers becoming today’s new reality: the effects of global warming are already measurable, they’re bad, and they’re going to get worse.

From rising sea levels to retreating glaciers, from increasingly frequent and severe extreme weather events to warmer oceans, the environmental consequences of higher global temperatures are playing themselves out around us. Meanwhile, human societies – particularly in the developing world – are already counting the cost. In some areas, food security is diminishing, water resources dwindling and there have been increases in heat-related deaths.

Even with the commitment shown by the nations of the world in reaching the Paris Agreement on climate change in 2015, we can expect a lot more damage from climate change in future.

And there’s something else we may see too: these environmental impacts leading to enormous losses of biodiversity on every continent and across all species groups.

This report summarises a groundbreaking research project from WWF, which we carried out in partnership with experts from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change at the University of East Anglia. Our findings result from the most comprehensive global analysis to date of projected changes in the climatic ranges of plants and animals, and they paint a startling picture of the link between global temperatures and the status of wildlife and ecosystems around us.

The research looks at the projected impacts of a range of warming scenarios on different species groups in 35 ‘Priority Places’ for conservation. These regions contain some of the richest and most remarkable biodiversity on the planet, including many iconic, endangered and endemic species.