Events

Thresholds for biodiversity loss on a rapidly warming planet

Alex is a Royal Society funded Principal Research Fellow at University College London. He obtained a BSc Hons. from UCL and his PhD in Biology from Imperial College London. His research focusses on understanding the origin and distribution of large scale gradients in biodiversity and the biological responses to global change. His work has been used as a biodiversity risk metric in the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers (2023), and he is a contributing author on the IPCC 6th Assessment WGII Report (2022). His research aims to support global policy to mitigate climate change and to inform conservation decision making.

Abstract: Climate change is a major threat to human society and to the species and ecosystems on which we depend. Warming over recent decades has already driven increasingly widespread declines of local populations, shifts in species geographic distributions and the restructuring of ecological communities. And, in the absence of massive emission reductions to limit future warming, these impacts will continue to escalate over the coming decades. But what does this future journey look like for biodiversity? Do risks to biodiversity rise gradually and in proportion to the level of warming? Or are there levels of warming beyond which populations, species, and ecosystems, are at risk of sudden and simultaneous collapse across wide areas? If so, what abiotic and biotic features determine the sharpness of these thresholds and how can they be avoided? In this talk I will share some thoughts on these questions and discuss recent, ongoing, and future work in our lab to understand the climate risks to biodiversity on a rapidly warming planet.

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