Predicting the Impact of Climate Change on Biodiversity - A GEOSS Scenario

While some two million plus species have been described, and many millions more remain to be discovered, climate change threatens to commit 15 to 37 per cent of these to extinction by 2050, accelerating a dangerous trend that land use change has already set in motion. An extinction episode of this magnitude would likely severely degrade the quality of vital ecosystem services, such as nutrient cycling, atmospheric regulation, soil formation, water purification, and pollination, upon which the human enterprise relies. Scientists are presented with the formidable challenge of assessing likely impacts of unprecedented interactions between rapid climate and land use changes, predicting how those impacts will unfold into the future, and providing policy options to decision-makers. These issues have been highlighted in stark terms in the newly released Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.1