Protected areas in climate space: What will the future bring?

Protected areas for conservation are intended to contain the environmental conditions that enable species and ecosystems to persist. The locations of such areas are fixed, but the environment within them may change, especially with climate change. To illustrate how multiple climate factors may change in relation to protection status, we used Principal Components Analysis to construct a climate space for California based on eight climate variables assessed at an 800-m resolution. We used projections of future climate derived from a downscaled regional climate model in conjunction with the IPCC SRES A2 scenario to assess how the climate space might shift under future conditions and to identify the combinations of conditions that may no longer occur in the state (disappearing climates) or that will be new to the state (novel climates). Disappearing climates, which were generally toward cooler and/or wetter extremes of the climate space, represented only 0.5% of California’s land area but occurred disproportionately more often in conservation areas that were fully protected. Novel climates (5.8% of California) also occurred disproportionately in fully protected areas; in most cases these climates were characterized by hotter and drier combinations with more seasonal precipitation. The disproportionate occurrence of both novel and disappearing future climates in currently protected areas may create challenges to conservation of the status quo, but such areas may also be “hotspots of opportunity” for responding to the extremes of climate change.