The global network of marine protected areas is not ready to face projected climate change

• Autor(a) principal: Camps Suárez, Núria
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.1/19233
• topic: Marine protected areas; Climate change; Climate analogs; Climate resilience; Shared socioeconomic pathways; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Outras Ciências Sociais

A current challenge of climate change adaptation is determining how resource management and conservation programs are designed to comprehensively protect biodiversity under present and future conditions. Marine protected areas (MPAs) are primary management tools aiming to reduce localized anthropogenic impacts on marine biodiversity but their implementation has neglected future climate change resilience, potentially reducing their performance in the years to come. Here, we ask if the global network of MPAs is ready to face future climate change by estimating its degree of exposure to novel climates (i.e., future conditions non-existent today) and by testing if its distribution inside each country's Exclusive Economic Zones is optimal. Our analyses were based on climatic analogs (sigma dissimilarity) using four biologically meaningful variables (temperature, oxygen, pH and primary productivity) from present-day conditions to the end of the 21st century, under contrasting Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) scenarios (SSP1-1.9 and SSP5-8.5). Our results show 8.59% of the MPAs exposed to novel climate under SSP1-1.9 in contrast to 81.05% under SSP5-8.5 (average sigma dissimilarity of MPAs: 0.7 and 4.40 with SSP1-1.9 and SSP5-8.5, respectively). Such novel conditions, particularly aggravated in tropical and polar regions, will likely produce local population extinctions and range shifting, while species search for climatic analogs. The four variables considered had a similar contribution on projected novel climates, reinforcing their role in driving range shifts at global scales. Moreover, only 9.6% and 4.7% of MPAs (SSP1-1.9 vs. SSP5-8.5) were estimated to be located in regions of national EEZs with reduced novel climates, suggesting the importance of considering climate change resilience during implementation phases. Overall, we show that broad compliance to the Paris Agreement expectations is key to increasing global MPA resilience and achieving international conservation targets like the post-2020 framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity, which considers expanding global MPA coverage up to 30% by 2030.