How climate proof is the European Union’s biodiversity policy?
In the European Union’s (EU) targets for the year 2020, climate change is recognised as a key challenge for biodiversity conservation. Meeting this challenge requires insight at three levels: the climate change impacts on biodiversity in the EU; the adaptation options put forward to alleviate these impacts; and how current EU policy can accommodate the adaptation options. Here, we bring these three levels together. In particular, we assess key concerns on the degree to which EU biodiversity policy facilitates climate change adaptation.
Our findings indicate that, firstly, available adaptation options do not cover all impacts of climate change. Second, proposed adaptation options are often generic and lack spatial specificity, revealing an urgent need for guidance on identifying appropriate, albeit adaptive responses to the range of climate change impacts. Third, while EU biodiversity policy requires and supports adaptation in several ways, its narrow interpretation hinders its potential to conserve biodiversity under climate change. Remaining policy gaps include: (1) conservation targets need to better match conservation needs; (2) targets need to be set in a spatially coherent manner across national scales; (3) current monitoring appears insufficient to address these gaps.
Authors
Specifications
- Publication title
- How climate proof is the European Union’s biodiversity policy?
- Publication date
- 31 July 2014
- Publication type
- Publication
- Magazine
- Regional Environmental Change
- Product number
- 1543
